iCitizenForum

Freedom's words

Back in the early 1990s, my students and I at Troy State University pondered ways to raise money for the Society of Professional Journalists’ Legal Defense Fund. The fund, all private donations, primarily gets used to support the legal battles of individual journalists and to support cases where journalists seek access to government records.

We decided to sell T-shirts. I came up with this verbiage: “Talk is cheap, free speech isn’t. Support SPJ’s Legal Defense Fund.”

We told buyers of the limited edition T-shirt—each came in a plastic bag with a certificate of authentication—that we would never make any more. We did not.

However, SPJ wanted to keep selling a version of the shirt and so the executive director asked if SPJ could acquire from me the copyright for the slogan. I agreed.

Now several organizations sell T-shirts bearing my slogan, and I live in anonymity.

As the July 4 holiday approached, I started thinking about that slogan and about freedom. I talk a lot about freedom in my classes, and I challenge people to define it for themselves in order for them to consider as individuals how much freedom they have and how much they would extend to others.

So today in recognition of Independence Day, I offer these thoughts from others on freedom.

• “Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.” —Alan Dean Foster.
• “The basis of a democratic state is liberty.” — Aristotle.
• “If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.” —Carl Schurz.
• “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” —George Bernard Shaw.
• “Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery.” —Lawana Blackwell.
• “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” — Thomas Jefferson.
• “Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.”—C. Wright Mills.
• “When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.” —Dorothy Thompson.
• “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” —Edward R. Murrow
• “I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.” —H.L. Mencken.

I hope you will share some of your thoughts on freedom with our readers.