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.
People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.
Our characters are the result of our conduct.
To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
Every sensation shares the same characteristic: it arises and passes away, arises and passes away. It is this arising and passing that we have to experience through practice, not just accept as truth because Buddha said so, not just accept because intellectually it seems logical enough to us. We must experience sensation’s nature, understand its flux, and learn not to react to it.
We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.
A small revenge is more human than no revenge at all.
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