As a general principle, I should put it that a man's country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.
Interpretation
A person's true homeland is defined by the values and loves they cherish, not by physical location.
This quote emphasizes that one's sense of belonging and identity is shaped more by the ideals and affections that one holds dear than by the geographical location they inhabit. Even if circumstances keep someone away from the land of their birth or where they feel most connected, the essence of their identity remains tied to those things they value deeply, making those values the true markers of their 'country.'
In practice
In a speech about immigration and identity, one might use this quote to highlight how love for one's culture transcends borders.
There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.
Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.
The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.
Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. It existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. 'Government money,' of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.
The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.
The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.
One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
If at any time all labour should cease, and all existing provisions be equally divided among the people, at the end of a single year there could scarcely be one human being left alive--all would have perished by want of subsistence.
But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.
Midway upon the journey of our life
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