
"Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is'" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization, The Guardian, February 20, 2011.
Journal entry (1923), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 7, by William V. Holtz (1993).
"Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is'" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization, The Guardian, February 20, 2011.
As quoted in The Reader's Digest, Vol. 37 (1940), p. 90; no specific source given.
Disputed
Variant: In all affairs – love, religion, politics, or business – it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
“Our present control of the sea is so absolute that it is sometimes taken for granted.”
Employment of Naval Forces (1948)
Quoted in Evans, 2002, p. 13, as reported in Fundamentals of action research, Vol. I (2005), p. 305.
Speech during the commemorations of D-Day, 06/06/2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10883074/D-Day-anniversary-Queen-stirred-by-commemorations.html
“There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.”
The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine
Andrew Grove in: " Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/andy-groves-warning-to-silicon-valley.html?_r=0", New York Times, March 26, 2016
New millennium
Freedom to Connect speech (2012)
Context: There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?
This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted.
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
A Severed Head (1961); 1976, p. 181.
Quoted by Max Weber in his lecture "Science as a Vocation"; in Lynda Walsh (2013), Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy (2013), Oxford University Press, p. 90