No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.
Interpretation
True liberty includes the freedom to make mistakes.
This quote by H. L. Mencken suggests that genuine freedom should encompass the ability to make choices that may lead to errors or misjudgments. It emphasizes that without the possibility of making mistakes, our freedom becomes superficial and does not truly allow for personal growth or authentic experiences.
In practice
In a debate on the importance of individual rights, this quote can illustrate the need for freedom that includes the possibility of making poor choices.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
If globalization is to realise its potential as a force for good, we have to look more closely at the means by which we handle our growing interdependence. We do not have a world government, but we do have an increasingly complex network of institutions that are concerned with global governance. They are central to our future and international human rights law
I know too well that these arguments from probabilities are imposters, and unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to be deceptive.
I'm not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.
Too often, ill-informed rhetoric has led to emotional hysteria that obfuscates solid evidence regarding the real problems faced by poor people and, in overwhelmingly great proportions, by black people.
The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
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