The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.
Ludwig Von MisesRead
The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without.
Interpretation
True threats to freedom arise internally rather than from external forces.
Ludwig Von Mises emphasizes that the greatest threats to American freedom and its way of life are not necessarily from foreign adversaries but rather from internal challenges, such as government overreach, societal complacency, and ideological conflicts. This perspective invites individuals to reflect on their own societal structures and the necessity of vigilance in protecting their freedoms against internal dangers.
In practice
In a political debate about civil liberties, this quote can highlight the need to focus on internal threats.
The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.
Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.
Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.
The public firm can nowhere maintain itself in free competition with the private firm; it is possible today only where it has a monopoly that excludes competition. Even that alone is evidence of its lesser economic productivity.
Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.
Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.
The truth is, anybody that becomes famous is an ass for a year and a half. You've got to give them a year and a half, two years. They are getting so much smoke blown, and their whole world gets so turned upside down, their responses become distorted. I give everybody a year or two to pull it together because, when it first happens, I know how it is.
False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.
In dreams begin responsibilities.
Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.
Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.
Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God.
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