It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
Interpretation
Liberty is often defended by engaging with controversial figures and ideas.
Felix Frankfurter's quote highlights the complex nature of liberty and its preservation throughout history. It suggests that the foundations of freedom have often emerged from contentious debates and the actions of individuals who may not conform to conventional standards of morality, implying that the struggle for liberty requires grappling with uncomfortable truths and challenging personalities.
In practice
During a speech on civil rights, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of engaging with all facets of historical debate.
Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and a democratic society presupposes confidence and candor in the relations of men with one another and eager collaboration for the larger ends of life instead of the pursuit of petty, selfish or vainglorious aims.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.
The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.
Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.
Let Indian history be set side by side with Europe history with what there is of the latter century by century and let us see whether India need blush at the comparison.
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