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.
Interpretation
Freedom lost through coercion can be regained, but freedom willingly given up is permanently lost.
This quote reflects on the nature of liberty and the implications of losing it. It suggests that while force can be used to both take and regain freedom, the more dangerous scenario is when individuals relinquish their liberty willingly, as that forfeiture leads to a permanent condition of subjugation and cannot be easily reclaimed.
In practice
In an essay discussing the importance of vigilance in democracy.
Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy.
Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.
Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.
We're part of creating this world in which we live, but we're unaware of how we do that or even that we do that.
It's extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. The things that people always go on about is, 'tell us about us', 'tell us about the first human being'. We are so self-obsessed with our own history. There is so much more out there than what connects to us.
I believe that very much of current Arminianism is simply ignorance of gospel doctrine; and if people began to study their Bibles, and to take the Word of God as they find it, they must inevitably, if believers, rise up to rejoice in the doctrines of grace.
A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation [...] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribed in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
Good never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning.
It should not be expected that what is spiritual can be brought before the eyes, before the senses. It must be experienced inwardly and spiritually.
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