This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, that you and your children may live.
Remember the earliest of days; grasp the years of generations that have been. Ask your father—he will tell you all; ask the elders of your kind, and they will say.
The citizens chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority, and at length . . . they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten. And this is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs dictatorship. . . . The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.
We can endure neither our vices nor their cures.
A man in a boat began to bore a hole under his seat. His fellow passengers protested. “What concern is it of yours?” he responded. “I am making a hole under my seat, not yours.” They replied, “That is so, but when the water enters and the boat sinks, we too will drown.”
Should any one of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name. The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved on our souls.
Pray for the welfare of the government, for if not for the fear of it, each man would swallow his neighbor alive.
When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty.
Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.
For so long as one hundred men remain alive, we shall never under any condition submit to the domination of the English. It is not for glory or riches or honors that we fight, but only for liberty, which no good man will consent to lose but with his life.
The best instituted governments, like the best constituted animal bodies, carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend to their dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live.
Free peoples, remember this maxim: liberty can be gained, but never regained.
There is not a more difficult subject for the understanding of men than to govern a large Empire upon a plan of liberty.
The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
All projects of government formed of a supposition of continual vigilance, sagacity, virtue, and firmness of the people, when possessed of the exercise of supreme power, are cheats and delusions.
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the times in which we live I am ready to worship it.
I have already said enough to put Anglo-American civilization in its true light. It is the product (and one should continually bear in mind this point of departure) of two perfectly distinct elements which elsewhere have often been at war with one another but which in America it was somehow possible to incorporate into each other, forming a marvelous combination. I mean the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom. The rest of democracy in America essentially plays out these themes and their successes, their failures, their weaknesses, their promises, and their threats.
There is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty.
Our political problem now is “Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave and half free?” The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.
I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.
I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. . . . I have never asked anything that does not breathe from those walls. All my political warfare has been in favor of the teachings coming forth from that sacred hall. May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if ever I prove false to those teachings.
May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of Civil War, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted on us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has grown. But we have forgotten God.
Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck, or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
In the strictest sense the history of liberty dates from 1776, for “never till then had men sought liberty knowing what they sought.”
The instructions of a secular morality that is not based on religious doctrines are exactly what a person ignorant of music might do, if he were made a conductor and started to wave his hands in front of musicians well rehearsed in what they were performing. By virtue of its own momentum, and from what previous conductors had taught the musicians, the music might continue for a while, but obviously the gesticulations made with the stick by a person who knows nothing about music would be useless and eventually confuse the musicians and throw the orchestra off course.
Starting with unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.
The American Government and the Constitution are based on the theology of Calvin and the philosophy of Hobbes.
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea will fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.
If there is one fact we really can prove from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.
I believe that each of us today has been instilled with a new consciousness and is more aware of the necessity and fundamentally sacred character of intellectual freedom than in former times. For it’s always that way with the sacred value of life. We forget it as long as it belongs to us, and give it as little attention during the unconcerned hours of our life as we do the stars in the light of day. Darkness must fall before we are aware of the majesty of the stars above our heads. It was necessary for this dark hour to fall, perhaps the darkest in history, to make us realize that freedom is as vital to our soul as breathing to our body.
Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me; these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy: traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare fluorescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.
The first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos.
It is indeed a truth, which all the great apostles of freedom . . . have never tired of explaining, that freedom has never worked without deeply ingrained moral beliefs and that coercion can be reduced to a minimum only where individuals can be expected as a rule to conform voluntarily to certain principles.
What is to the one the road to freedom, seems to the other the reverse. In the name of liberty the road into serfdom is trod. To renounce liberty in a free decision counts for many as the highest freedom. Liberty arouses enthusiasm, but liberty also arouses anxiety. It may look as if men do not want liberty at all, indeed as though they would like to avoid the possibility of liberty.
Having lived in Poland and later in Germany, I know what America really means. For generations America was the great promise, the great joy, the last hope of humanity. Ten years ago if I had said to students that America is a great blessing and an example to the world, they would have laughed at me. Why speak such banalities? Today one of the saddest experiences of my life is to observe what is happening to America morally. The world once had a great hope, a model: America. What is going to happen to America?
No one has changed a great nation without appealing to its soul, without stimulating a national idealism.
Yet if the gross national product measures all of this, there is much that it does not include. It measures neither the health of our children, the quality of their education, nor the joy of their play. It measures neither the beauty of our poetry, nor the strength of our marriages. It pays no heed to the intelligence of our public debate, nor the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our wit nor our courage, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about our country except those things that make us proud to be a part of it.
If all values are relative, then, for example it is ultimately impossible to say anything good or bad about slavery or Adolf Hitler. It is only possible to say that one likes or dislikes Hitler in the same way that one likes or dislikes corn flakes for breakfast. To the founders, this view would have cut against the grain of reason and common sense. The choice between democracy and Nazism is not a choice between Cheerios or Rice Krispies, but a choice between justice or injustice, indeed life or death.
Standard works on the history of the politics of freedom trace it back through Marx, Rousseau and Hobbes to Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, and the Greek city states (Athens in particular) of the fifth century BCE. To be sure, words like “democracy” (rule by the people) are Greek in origin. The Greeks were gifted at abstract nouns and systematic thought. However if we look at the “birth of the modern”—at figures like Milton, Hobbes and Locke in England, and the founding fathers of America—the book with which they were in dialogue was not Plato or Aristotle but the Hebrew Bible. Hobbes quoted it 657 times in The Leviathan alone. Long before the Greek philosophers, and far more profoundly, at Mount Sinai the concept of a free society was born.
Freedom is more than revolution. The pages of history are littered with people who won their freedom only to lose it again. The “constitution of liberty” is one of the most vulnerable of all human achievements. Individual freedom is simple. Collective freedom—a society that honors the equal dignity of all—depends on constant vigilance, a sustained effort of education. If we forget where we came from, the battle our ancestors fought and the long journey they had to take, then in the end we lose it again.
The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is. He confuses it with feeling.
Democracy only gives people the kind of government they deserve.
Civilization hangs suspended from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding.
Can the West overcome the forgetfulness that is the nemesis of every successful civilization?