“We have confused the free with the free and easy.”

Putting First Things (1960)

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Do you have more details about the quote "We have confused the free with the free and easy." by Adlai Stevenson?
Adlai Stevenson photo
Adlai Stevenson 131
mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the… 1900–1965

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“Any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the law rules, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.”

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“For one heart beat the
Heart was free and moved itself. O love,
I who am lost and damned with words,
Whose words are a business and an art,
I have no words. These words, this poem, this
Is all confusion and ignorance.
But I know that coached by your sweet heart,
My heart beat one free beat and sent
Through all my flesh the blood of truth.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

In Defense of the Earth (1956), She Is Away
Context: Now I know surely and forever,
However much I have blotted our
Waking love, its memory is still
there. And I know the web, the net,
The blind and crippled bird. For then, for
One brief instant it was not blind, nor
Trapped, not crippled. For one heart beat the
Heart was free and moved itself. O love,
I who am lost and damned with words,
Whose words are a business and an art,
I have no words. These words, this poem, this
Is all confusion and ignorance.
But I know that coached by your sweet heart,
My heart beat one free beat and sent
Through all my flesh the blood of truth.

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