As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends.
Interpretation
Liberty can be harmed by those who are supposed to protect it.
Otto Hermann Kahn's quote suggests that the greatest threats to liberty often come not from its outright enemies, but rather from those within its own ranks who fail to uphold and protect it. This serves as a reminder that vigilance and responsibility are necessary among advocates and guardians of freedom to ensure it is preserved and nurtured.
In practice
In a speech about civic duty, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of protecting freedom.
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.
Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence
It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.
War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.
If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.
The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone.
I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?
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