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.
Though the eye is small, the soul which sees through it is greater and vaster than all the things which it perceives. In fact, it is so great that it includes all objects, however large or numerous, within itself. For it is not so much that you are within the cosmos as that the cosmos is within you.
Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.
Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.
It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.
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