Noteable Quote - Edward Gibbon - Granite Grok

Noteable Quote – Edward Gibbon

Promoted from the comments on Steve’s post on “Self Indulgence vs. Basic Rights”:

“The five marks of the Roman decaying culture:

  • Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;
  • Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;
  • Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original;
  • Widening disparity between very rich and very poor;
  • Increased demand to live off the state.”

“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.”

(H/T: Radical Moderate)

Once one chooses, or a society chooses, security and peace of mind, they will have neither – and will have lost the most valuable of all: Freedom.  When individuals begin to believe that Government can do more than they can, and then demand that it does, the slippery slope becomes frictionless.

Freedom is NOT free – it demands and requires sacrifice, integrity, self-responsibility, and an adherence to The Rule of Law and the Right to Private Property.  Begin to remove those things from the Public’s morality and one has already decided to run towards that slope.

I will add this: I also believe that a supportive pillar of Freedom is a believe in or a recognition of that there is a Higher Power (be it the founder’s Deity or Creator, or God) to which we will be held accountable (with all due respect to my humanist friends who also strive to keep Liberty & Freedom in the forefront).  Statists & Big Government lovers, when all the rhetoric is stripped away, do not – their allegiance is to the Collective (and therefore, to themselves).

We have seen the outcome when that happens many times in the past – it never turns out well.

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