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.
Water in the boat is the ruin of the boat, but water under the boat is its support.
Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.
So far as I am acquainted with the principles and doctrines of Freemasonry, I conceive it to be founded in benevolence and to be exercised only for the good of mankind.
To be white in America is to have the confidence to say, without a second thought: this space, this neighborhood, this city, this county, this country is mine.
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
Authority, power, and wealth do not change a man; they only reveal him
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