The true test of one's commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn't come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.
Interpretation
True commitment to freedom is tested by tolerance for actions we may disagree with.
Walter E. Williams emphasizes that the ultimate measure of one's dedication to liberty and private property rights is not in supporting choices that align with our beliefs, but rather in allowing and respecting choices that contradict them. This principle highlights the importance of tolerance and the essence of true freedom, which encompasses all voluntary actions, regardless of our personal opinions on those actions.
In practice
Using this quote during a debate about the limits of free speech.
However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.
In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves.
What we call the market is really a democratic process involving millions, and in some markets billions, of people making personal decisions that express their preferences. When you hear someone say that he doesn't trust the market, and wants to replace it with government edicts, he's really calling for a switch from a democratic process to a totalitarian one.
Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".
If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.
The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.
But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.
I embrace my rival, but only to strangle him.
There is no getting around the reality that the second Iraq war was a war of choice; had it been carried out differently, it still would have been an expensive choice and almost certainly a bad one.
When those deserving of Paradise would enter Paradise, the Blessed and the Exalted would ask: Do you wish Me to give you anything more? They would say: Hast Thou not brightened our faces? Hast Thou not made us enter Paradise and saved us from Fire? He would lift the veil, and of things given to them nothing would be dearer to them than the sight of their Lord, the Mighty and the Glorious.
To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts.
Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.
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