“What is freedom? There is no such thing as absolute freedom!”
As quoted in " Eja! Eja! Alala!" in TIME magazine (23 July 1923) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,716187,00.html
1920s
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Benito Mussolini 127
Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Le… 1883–1945Related quotes
As quoted in Letters of H. L. Mencken (1961) edited by Guy J. Forgue, p. xiii
1940s–present
Address at the National Archives dedicating a shrine for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (15 December 1952) https://trumanlibrary.org/calendar/viewpapers.php?pid=2102
Context: Of course, there are dangers in religious freedom and freedom of opinion. But to deny these rights is worse than dangerous, it is absolutely fatal to liberty. The external threat to liberty should not drive us into suppressing liberty at home. Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.
All freedom-loving nations, not the United States alone, are facing a stern challenge from the Communist tyranny. In the circumstances, alarm is justified. The man who isn't alarmed simply doesn't understand the situation — or he is crazy. But alarm is one thing, and hysteria is another. Hysteria impels people to destroy the very thing they are struggling to preserve.
Invasion and conquest by Communist armies would be a horror beyond our capacity to imagine. But invasion and conquest by Communist ideas of right and wrong would be just as bad.
For us to embrace the methods and morals of communism in order to defeat Communist aggression would be a moral disaster worse than any physical catastrophe. If that should come to pass, then the Constitution and the Declaration would be utterly dead and what we are doing today would be the gloomiest burial in the history of the world.
“It's the little things that make Freedom become Not Freedom.”
[Theo, de Raadt, Re: no more apache updates, MARC, openbsd-misc (Mailing list), http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=108655228511377, 2004-06-06, 2017-04-20]
Source: Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic (2000), p. 25
The Temper of Our Time (1967)
Context: Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.
Source: Sceptical Essays