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.
All the tears of a penitent sinner, should he shed as many as there have fallen drops of rain, since the creation, to this day, cannot wash away one sin. The everLasting burnings in hell, cannot purify the flaming conscience, from the least sin.
It is important to ask ourselves, as citizens, whether a world power can provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety.
An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
On occasion, terrorists will succeed despite our best efforts. That is part of the legacy of 9/11. But 9/11 also shows us that while terrorists can destroy, they are unable to create.
When, after having examined in detail the organization of the Supreme Court, one comes to consider in sum the prerogatives that have been given it, one discovers without difficulty that a more immense judicial power has never been constituted in any people.
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