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Quote of the Day: Peace or Freedom?
“You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”
―
In this time of assault on liberty, I felt that this quote was appropriate.
Published in Group Writing
This is an excellent one, but I believe I have used it before.
Utter nonsense.
You think? I wouldn’t call the two incompatible, but “count[ing] on having both at once” seems like a mistake.
Exactly. It is possible to have peace and freedom. It is possible to have freedom and not peace. It is possible to have peace and not freedom. And it is possible to have neither peace nor freedom.
Utter nonsense.
I bet Heinlein couldn’t do all of those.
In particular, I bet he couldn’t program a computer. USE one, okay. But program? Not really. Even if he thought he was, he probably wasn’t.
I suspect his buildings probably wouldn’t last very long either.
You calling me an insect? :)
Did you know one of his hobbies was stone masonry?
Sounds like he could make a good wall, or a patio… but a full building?
Built his own house.
He and his (third) wife were both engineers.
Keep in mind that this comes from his novel “Time Enough for Love” and is one of the entries in the Notebooks for Lazarus Long…
Lazarus Long had plenty of time to not specialize.
I think we (by that I mean the vast majority of people in modern times) always have both to some degree or another. It can vary from place to place, of course. Modern Americans have a great deal of both, relatively speaking.
But, there’s always the chance, even in America, however small, of being assaulted, randomly or otherwise, and life always has it’s arguments, controversies, scandals, etc…some big and some small which interrupt the feeling of peace. And you can’t just do whatever you want – gotta get a building permit for your fence, or a license to drive, or whatever. But generally speaking, peace and freedom, as long as you don’t insist on their absolute forms, co-exist all the time.
Yes, it is provocative (or even nonsense as HangOn says) as it said in a way to prompt discussion. Some level of freedom must be given up to have peace as a set of societal rules establish peace. But I would agree, it is not all or nothing.
And taking it to the extreme in either direction would be absurd. On one side, you have the peace of Landru (from “The Return of the Archons”) and on the other you have anarchy.
I think Apollo in Battlestar Galactica Classic said something like this:
The choice before us is not between war and peace, but between war and slavery.
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Landru had anarchy too, but only during The Red Hour.
A whole night during Festival.
Well technically The Red Hour was just the starting point.
Agreed, and I offer a corollary: freedom and equality (of result, today referred to as “equity”) can not co-exist.
Yes, of course.
I think you have a better statement here than Heinlein’s.
In its broadest sense, freedom means absence of obligations — an accurate description of today’s prevailing mindset, which promotes rights or privileges at the expense of obligations.
When there was a military draft, young men lost their freedom at the age of 18. However, serving in the military instilled virtues such as courage, a sense of mutual responsibility, and national pride. Those virtues are critical for ensuring the peace of the land.
There is a difference between liberty and license.
Remind me to post that Austin Powers line I like later from the compy.