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.
We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.
This American government - what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.
I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.
The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.
I've always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.
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