Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing from him who will not give her all. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers.
Interpretation
Liberty requires total commitment and reveals a deep connection to the heart and soul.
This quote by Clarence Darrow suggests that true liberty demands absolute devotion and cannot be understood superficially. It portrays liberty as a powerful force that captivates the individual entirely, indicating that anything less than total commitment will not suffice, and once one has embraced liberty, they can find no substitute for its allure.
In practice
During a speech about civil rights, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of fully embracing freedom.
With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men.
Do I need to argue to Your Honor that cruelty only breeds cruelty? That hatred only causes hatred; that if there is any way to soften this human heart which is hard enough at its best, if there is any way to kill evil and hatred and all that goes with it, it is not through evil and hatred and cruelty; it is through charity, and love, and understanding?
Chase after the truth like all hell.
No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.
The trouble with law is lawyers.
The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime.
Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT magic.
If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.
Your state is not at all to be measured by the opposition that sin makes to you, but by the opposition you make to it.
Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.