It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.
Franklin D. RooseveltRead
The price of liberty is something more than eternal vigilance. There must also be eternal advance. We can save the rights we have inherited from our fathers only by winning new ones to bequeath our children.
Interpretation
Liberty requires constant effort and progress beyond mere vigilance.
This quote emphasizes that the preservation and advancement of freedom cannot rely solely on staying alert to threats; it necessitates active progress and the pursuit of new rights. The speaker highlights the importance of not only safeguarding the freedoms inherited from previous generations but also the obligation to strive for new liberties that can be passed down to future generations.
In practice
A speaker at a civic engagement event could use this quote to inspire community participation.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.
I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.
Far, far below the deepest delvings of the dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things.
May I not seem to have lived in vain.
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