In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
Interpretation
True freedom is not given to us; we must earn it through our actions and choices.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's quote highlights the idea that freedom is not a gift that can be handed down or given to individuals. Instead, true freedom requires effort, struggle, and the proactive pursuit of one's own rights and liberties, emphasizing personal responsibility and agency in attaining genuine freedom.
In practice
This quote can inspire discussions in a classroom about the nature of freedom and personal agency.
There has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power - but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. ... Let them tell that to the Marines!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have; but, in their stead, / Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, / Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not" (5.3.25-28).
My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.
...True prayer is measured by weight, not by length. A single groan before God may have more fullness of prayer in it than a fine oration of great length.
Paris is the fountain-head of European civilisation, as Gomukhi is of the Ganga.
These two are the parts. The inner silence - the silence so deep that there is no vibration in your being. You are, but there are no waves. You are just a pool without waves, not a single wave arises. The whole being silent, still. Inside, at the center, silence, and on the periphery, celebration and laughter. And only silence can laugh, because only silence can understand the cosmic joke.
The purpose of the present study is not as it is in other inquiries, the attainment of knowledge, we are not conducting this inquiry in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, else there would be no advantage in studying it. For that reason, it becomes necessary to examine the problem of our actions and to ask how they are to be performed. For as we have said, the actions determine what kind of characteristics are developed.
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