When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.
Interpretation
Freedom lost through coercion can be regained, but freedom willingly given up is permanently lost.
This quote reflects on the nature of liberty and the implications of losing it. It suggests that while force can be used to both take and regain freedom, the more dangerous scenario is when individuals relinquish their liberty willingly, as that forfeiture leads to a permanent condition of subjugation and cannot be easily reclaimed.
In practice
In an essay discussing the importance of vigilance in democracy.
Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy.
Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.
Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.
Iβll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.
There are some dead who are more alive than the living.
Indulged habits of dependence create habits of indolence, and indolence opens the portal to petty errors, to many degrading habits, and to vice and crime with their attendant train of miseries.
We cannot change ideas in the minds of men and races with machine guns or battle ships.
Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.
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