We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.
Interpretation
True freedom requires effort and action; many do not pursue it.
Karl Hess's quote highlights the concept of freedom as an illusion for those who do not actively seek it out. He suggests that while we believe we are free, our choices are often limited by societal norms and regulations, akin to a balloon constrained within a factory of pins. To experience true freedom, one must challenge these constraints and strive to live authentically, regardless of the obstacles.
In practice
In a speech about civil rights, you might reference this quote to emphasize the need for active participation in securing freedoms.
It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.
They [anarchists] spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be free. After that it’s all choice and chance.
The revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.
Perhaps you're not finished with your story, and who knows if you'll ever finish it or not. Honestly, it's not that important.
It is bad policy to regulate everything... where things may better regulate themselves and can be better promoted by private exertions; but it is no less bad policy to let those things alone which can only be promoted by interfering social power.
One of the reasons why fundamentalists are so aggressive in trying to promote fundamentalism is because deep down they know it's arbitrary. If you're comfortable with your belief you don't need to convince other people to agree with you.
We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God.
Being bodiless, God is nowhere, but as God He is everywhere. If there were a mountain, a place or any part of Creation where God was not, then He would be found to be in some way circumscribed. So He is everywhere and in everything. In what way is this so? Is He contained not by each part but by the whole? No, because then that would be a body. He embraces and encompasses everything, and is Himself everywhere and also above everything, worshipped by true worshippers in His Spirit and Truth.
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
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