“Liberty lives in the hearts of men and women. If it dies there, no constitution, no law and no court can save it.” — Roy Masters, June 29, 2015
To that I would add “no military and no armed citizenry” can save it.
I heard him say it while listening to his radio program on internet re-feed on the way to work. He may have been quoting someone else for all I know, so don’t hold me to the attribution. It’s the kind of thing he’d blurt out spontaneously anyway, so I figured it was his.
It was by Judge Learned Hand.
Thank you.
As Ten Bears said, “No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men.”
Yes, well the American natives learned that lesson for sure. Or should have. If they’d truly learned it they wouldn’t be taking the money and other dispensation from the government which relegates them to second-class status. “Enough of your money and favors! Now leave us alone!” being NOT among their well-known mottos. Early U.S. government screwed them over, then the Progressive took over to finish the job. Same as with black people.
Great story by the way. Gone to Texas, adapted to movie form under the title The Outlaw Josey Wales.
Josey Wales was a great movie. The story was written by a truly bizarre writer. The same author passed himself off as a Cherokee, claiming that his story of a young Indian boy growing up, The Education of Little Tree was autobiographical. This was all after his earlier career as a segregationist, Klansman, and political speechwriter. He wrote the line “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” for George Wallace, and later ran against Wallace for governor on a segregationist platform
Wow, Richard. I didn’t know. That’s terrible, but thank you for the information. I’ll need to read into that a bit farther now.
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to loose.
Bobbie McGee (if I spelled the name right). I believe that to be a sort of twisted version of the truth. Bob Marley hit it much closer with “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds”.
If we’re free from undue attachment to people, places and things, then it matters not what we have or don’t have. Freedom (salvation) lies elsewhere. Liberty has been said to be a political concept.
As I see it then, liberty is the political analog to freedom as defined above. One may be free of undue attachment to his property and belongings, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to take them away from him.
If nethier you nor I are attached to things, then there is no incentive for you to take them from me by force.
Socialism takes that beautiful ideal and turns it into something horrible. It says “You’re not supposed to be attached to your property and belongings, so I’ll just go ahead and relieve you of them. That or I’ll kill you or do something else unpleasant. Your choice.” It denies your very humanity by userping that which was given to you as a human – your mind and your mind’s choices. There is no more charity for example. There’s only compliance in coercive redistribution.
If freedom, then, is just another word for nothing left to lose, then communism is freedom. And that is in fact how comunists see it. There’s enough of a grain of truth in it that it sort of works, in a sick and twisted sort of way.