We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
Interpretation
Freedom requires sacrifice and effort.
This quote by H. L. Mencken suggests that gaining and maintaining freedom is not free; it comes with responsibilities and sometimes requires sacrifices. It highlights the importance of being ready to take action and make choices that may involve difficulties or costs in order to enjoy and safeguard one's freedom.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of civil rights, you might use this quote to highlight the sacrifices made in history for freedom.
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.
A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
I think it's all lovely hallucination but I love it sorta.
So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.
Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.
It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true.
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