“Giving up freedom for security has begun to look naive.”

— Larry Niven

Earlier version: 4) F x S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa.
Niven's Laws
Context: 4) Giving up freedom for security has begun to look naive.
Even to me. Many of you were ahead of me on this — Three out of four hijacked airplanes destroyed the World Trade Center and a piece of the Pentagon in 2001. How is it possible that those planes were taken using only five perps armed with knives? It was possible because all those hundreds of passengers had been carefully stripped of every possible weapon. We may want to reconsider this approach. It doesn't work in high schools either.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Giving up freedom for security has begun to look naive." by Larry Niven?

Larry Niven 138

American writer 1938

Related quotes

“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

This quotation appeared in an article by Margaret Thatcher, "The Moral Foundations of Society" ( Imprimis, March 1995 https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-moral-foundations-of-society/), which was an edited version of a lecture Thatcher had given at Hillsdale College in November 1994. Here is the actual passage from Thatcher's article:
<blockquote>[M]ore than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted security. Yet they lost everything—security, comfort, and freedom. This was because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder, then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenians' dire fate whenever we confront demands for increased state paternalism.</blockquote>
The italicized passage above originated with Thatcher. In characterizing the Athenians in the article she cited Sir Edward Gibbon, but she seems to have been paraphrasing statements in "Athens' Failure," a chapter of classicist Edith Hamilton's book The Echo of Greece (1957), pp. 47–48 http://www.ergo-sum.net/books/Hamilton_EchoOfGreece_pp.47-48.jpg).
Misattributed

“[M]ore than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted security. Yet they lost everything—security, comfort, and freedom. This was because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder, then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenians' dire fate whenever we confront demands for increased state paternalism.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Imprimis, "The Moral Foundations of Society" (March 1995), http://imprimisarchives.hillsdale.edu/file/archives/pdf/1995_03_Imprimis.pdf an edited version of a lecture Thatcher had delivered at Hillsdale College in November 1994. In characterizing the Athenians Thatcher was paraphrasing from "Athens' Failure," a chapter of classicist Edith Hamilton's book The Echo of Greece (1957), pp.47-48, http://www.ergo-sum.net/books/Hamilton_EchoOfGreece_pp.47-48.jpg but in her lecture Thatcher mistakenly attributed the opinions to Edward Gibbon. Subsequently, a version of this quotation has been widely circulated on the Internet, misattributed to Gibbon.
In a later address, "The Moral Foundation of Democracy," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb1sgMoYb70 given in April 1996 at a Clearwater, Florida gathering of the James Madison Institute, Thatcher delivered the same sentiment in a slightly different way: " 'In the end, more than they wanted freedom, [the Athenians] wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life. But they lost it all—security, comfort, and freedom. … When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.' There you have the germ of the dependency culture: freedom from responsibility."
Post-Prime Ministerial

“The Question of sovereignty is often raised. I am one of those who believe that in a modern world one has to give up a great deal of sovereignty. I am prepared to give up sovereignty to the world, but not to a selected number of European countries. That is not giving up something for world security; it is giving something up to sectional interests.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1962/nov/08/britain-and-the-common-market in the House of Lords on the British application to join the Common Market (8 November 1962).
1960s

“We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.”

Karl Popper book The Open Society and Its Enemies

Vol. 2, Ch. 21 "An Evaluation of the Prophecy"
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

“In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1940s, State of the Union Address — The Four Freedoms (1941)
Context: In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.