Endigar 175
A worn out, drugged up, addicted mass of humanity make poor champions of liberty and great fodder for tyrants. My personal struggle for freedom from addiction is akin to mankind’s struggle to break free of the many shackles forged to contain the wild and powerful human spirit. Here is a collection of some of my favorite quotes on freedom:
ARAGORN: What do you fear, lady?
EOWYN: A cage. To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recalls or desire.
William Wallace: Longshanks desires peace?
Princess Isabelle: He declares it to me, I swear it. He proposes that you withdraw your attack. In return he grants you title, estates, and this chest of gold which I am to pay to you personally.
William Wallace: A lordship and titles. Gold. That I should become Judas?
Princess Isabelle: Peace is made in such ways.
William Wallace: Slaves are made in such ways. The last time Longshanks spoke of peace I was a boy. And many Scottish nobles, who would not be slaves, were lured by him under a flag of truce to a barn, where he had them hanged. I was very young, but I remember Longshank’s notion of peace
Robert’s Father: Nothing?
Robert the Bruce:I have nothing. Men fight for me because if they do not, I throw them off my land and I starve their wives and children. Those men who bled the ground red at Falkirk fought for William Wallace. He fights for something that I never had. And I took it from him, when I betrayed him. I saw it in his face on the battlefield and it’s tearing me apart.
Robert’s Father: All men betray. All lose heart.
Robert the Bruce: I don’t want to lose heart. I want to believe as he does.
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself. ~Thomas Paine
Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake,… of searching and experimenting,… of saying No to any authority – literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, and even political. ~Ignazio Silone, The God That Failed, 1950
The patriot’s blood is the seed of Freedom’s tree. ~Thomas Campbell
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. ~Abraham Lincoln
We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls. ~Robert J. McCracken
We have to call it “freedom”: who’d want to die for “a lesser tyranny”? ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. ~Woodrow Wilson
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. ~Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck. ~Frederick Douglass, speech, Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Washington, D.C., 1883
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. ~James Madison, speech, Virginia Convention, 1788
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. ~George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, “Maxims: Liberty and Equality,” 1905
When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered. (endigar input – hopelessness without the help of a Higher Power)
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.
None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have. For example, the freedom of thought. Instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
21
Daily Reprieve 
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