Rights are best guarded when each person and group guards for others those rights they wish guarded for themselves.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of protecting the rights of others as a means of ensuring one's own rights are protected.
Jeffrey R. Holland's quote suggests that self-interest and altruism are interconnected when it comes to rights. By advocating for the rights of others, individuals and groups create a collective safeguarding of freedoms that benefits everyone, including themselves. This reciprocal protection fosters a society where rights are universally respected and upheld, highlighting our shared responsibility in the pursuit of justice and equality.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social justice, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of solidarity in protecting individual rights.
For 179 years [The Book of Mormon] has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other religious history β perhaps like no other book in any religious history- and still, it stands.
Don't you quit. You keep walking, you keep trying, there is help and happiness ahead. Some blessings come soon. Some come late. Some don't come until heaven. But for those who embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, they come. It will be alright in the end. Trust God and believe in Good Things to Come.
Maybe the purchasing and the making and the wrapping and the decorating - those delightfully generous and important expressions of our love at Christmas - should be separated, if only slightly, from the more quiet, personal moments when we consider the meaning of the Baby (and his birth) who prompts the giving of such gifts.
Don't you quit! You keep walking. You keep trying. There is help & happiness ahead.
Brothers and sisters, this is a divine work in process, with the manifestations and blessings of it abounding in every direction, so please donβt hyperventilate if from time to time issues arise that need to be examined, understood, and resolved. They do and they will. In this Church, what we know will always trump what we do not know. And remember, in this world, everyone is to walk by faith.
The Crucifixion, Atonement, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ mark the beginning of a Christian Life, not the end of it.
Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.
'Death with dignity' is our society's expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms.
Rash indeed is he who reckons on tomorrow, or happily on the days beyond it; for tomorrow is not, until today is past.
That is someone who follows the teachings of the nonviolent Jesus and takes the gospel personally, and then pays the price. I fall into that category.
In general, I agree with Socrates that what democracies badly need is the examined life, and we need to think critically about ourselves.
The sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word.
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