Happy Birthday, Samuel Adams

Copley, Samuel Adams, 1772

The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.

Samuel Adams, born on this day in 1722, submitted as "Candita" to the Boston Globe, 14 October 1771

Liberty.

Gardner, "The Last Photograph Taken of Lincoln from Life," 1865

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty.  With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty.

Abraham Lincoln, from his address at Sanitary Fair in Baltimore April 18, 1864

Unobstructed.

Otis, Thomas Jefferson, 1817

I abandon politics, and accomodate myself chearfully to things as they go; confident in the wisdom of those who direct them, and that they will be better and better directed in the progressive course of knolege and experience. our successors start on our shoulders. they know all that we know, and will add to that stock the discoveries of the next 50. years; and what will be their amount we may estimate from what the last 50. years have added to the science of human concerns. the thoughts of others, as I find them on paper, are my amusement and delight; but the labors of the mind in abstruse investigations are irksome, and writing itself is become a slow and painful operation, occasioned by a stiffened wrist, the consequence of a former dislocation. I will however essay the two definitions which you say are more particularly interesting at present: I mean those of the terms Liberty & Republic, aware however that they have been so multifariously applied as to convey no precise idea to the mind. of Liberty then I would say that, in the whole plenitude of it’s extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will: but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law"; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

Thomas Jefferson, from his letter to Isaac H. Tiffany, April 4, 1819

Alert.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, from Olmstead v. U.S. (1928)

Happy Birthday, Bentham

Pickersgill, Jeremy Bentham, 1829

Every law is an infraction of liberty.

Jeremy Bentham, born on this day in 1748

Happy Birthday, Adams

Whitney, Samuel Adams, 1880

The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.

Samuel Adams, born on this date in 1722.

Monopolizes.

What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish? 

Alexis de Tocqueville, born on this day in 1805

Happy Birthday, Lazarus

Johnson and Kurtz, Emma Lazaraus, 1889

The NEW COLOSSUS

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus, born on this day in 

Responsibility.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

George Bernard Shaw

Restore.

We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights. 

Pearl S. Buck

Liberty

Ruskin, Self-Portrait, 1874

One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea-urn, which was boiling merrily. It was an early taste for bronzes, I suppose; but I was resolute about it. My mother bade me keep my fingers back; I insisted on putting them forward. My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said — "Let him touch it, Nurse."  So I touched it, — and that was my first lesson in the meaning of the word Liberty. It was the first piece of Liberty I got, and the last which for some time I asked for.

John Ruskin, from E.T. Cook's, The Life of John Ruskin

Keep.

Consume.

Stuart, Thomas Jefferson, 1805

I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance. We have seen indeed once within the record. of history a compleat eclipse of the human mind continuing for centuries. and this too by swarms of the same Northern barbarians, conquering and taking possession of the countries and governments of the civilized world. should this be again attempted, should the same Northern hordes, allured again by the corn wine, and oil of the South, be able again to settle their swarms in the countries of their growth, the art of printing alone and the vast dissemination of books, will maintain the mind where it is, and raise the conquering ruffians to the level of the conquered, instead of degrading those to that of their conquerors and even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. in short, the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776 have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism. on the contrary they will consume these engines, and all who work them.

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to John Adams, 12 September 1821

Happy Birthday, Bartoli

My dream has been realized. I can only say that I am enchanted. This thing will live to eternity, when we shall have passed away, and everything living with us has moldered away; to glorify the republic and liberty over there in the hope that someday I will find it again here in France.

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, born on this day in 1834

Asylum.

Chappel, Samuel Adams, 1862

Samuel Adams' "On American Independence," from August 1, 1776 ...

Courage, then, my countrymen! Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth, for civil and religious liberty? ...

Other nations have received their laws from conquerors; some are indebted for a constitution to the suffering of their ancestors through revolving centuries. The people of this country, alone, have formally and deliberately chosen a government for themselves, and with open and uninfluenced consent bound themselves into a social compact. Here no man proclaims his birth or wealth as a title to honorable distinction, or to sanctify ignorance and vice with the name of hereditary authority. He who has most zeal and ability to promote public felicity, let him be the servant of the public. This is the only line of distinction drawn by nature. Leave the bird of night to the obscurity for which nature intended him, and expect only from the eagle to brush the clouds with his wings and look boldly in the face of the sun.

Happy Birthday, Jefferson

Sully, Thomas Jefferson, 1821

Thomas Jefferson was born on this day in 1743.

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, January 24, 1786

Incomprehensible.

Pyle, Thomas Jefferson Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1898

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him thro’ his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to Jean Nicolas Démeunier, 26 June 1786

Born.

Johnson, A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, 1862

LIBERTY

On my school notebooks

On my desk and on the trees

On the sands of snow

I write your name

On the pages I have read

On all the white pages

Stone, blood, paper or ash

I write your name

On the images of gold

On the weapons of the warriors

On the crown of the king

I write your name

On the jungle and the desert

On the nest and on the brier

On the echo of my childhood

I write your name

On all my scarves of blue

On the moist sunlit swamps

On the living lake of moonlight

I write your name

On the fields, on the horizon

On the birds’ wings

And on the mill of shadows

I write your name

On each whiff of daybreak

On the sea, on the boats

On the demented mountaintop

I write your name

On the froth of the cloud

On the sweat of the storm

On the dense rain and the flat

I write your name

On the flickering figures

On the bells of colors

On the natural truth

I write your name

On the high paths

On the deployed routes

On the crowd-thronged square

I write your name

On the lamp which is lit

On the lamp which isn’t

On my reunited thoughts

I write your name

On a fruit cut in two

Of my mirror and my chamber

On my bed, an empty shell

I write your name

On my dog, greathearted and greedy

On his pricked-up ears

On his blundering paws

I write your name

On the latch of my door

On those familiar objects

On the torrents of a good fire

I write your name

On the harmony of the flesh

On the faces of my friends

On each outstretched hand

I write your name

On the window of surprises

On a pair of expectant lips

In a state far deeper than silence

I write your name

On my crumbled hiding-places

On my sunken lighthouses

On my walls and my ennui

I write your name

On abstraction without desire

On naked solitude

On the marches of death

I write your name

And for the want of a word

I renew my life

For I was born to know you

To name you

Liberty.

Paul Eluard

Rise.

The old laws of England -- they

Whose reverend heads with age are gray,

Children of a wiser day;

And whose solemn voice must be

Thine own echo -- Liberty!

On those who first should violate

Such sacred heralds in their state

Rest the blood that must ensue,

And it will not rest on you.

And if then the tyrants dare

Let them ride among you there,

Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew,--

What they like, that let them do.

With folded arms and steady eyes,

And little fear, and less surprise,

Look upon them as they slay

Till their rage has died away.

Then they will return with shame

To the place from which they came,

And the blood thus shed will speak

In hot blushes on their cheek.

 Every woman in the land

Will point at them as they stand--

They will hardly dare to greet

Their acquaintance in the street.

And the bold, true warriors

Who have hugged Danger in wars

Will turn to those who would be free,

Ashamed of such base company.

And that slaughter to the Nation

Shall steam up like inspiration,

Eloquent, oracular;

A volcano heard afar.

And these words shall then become

Like Oppression's thundered doom

Ringing through each heart and brain,

Heard again -- again -- again--

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number--

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you--

Ye are many -- they are few.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, from "The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester"

Limits.

Otis, Thomas Jefferson, 1817

I abandon politics, and accomodate myself chearfully to things as they go; confident in the wisdom of those who direct them, and that they will be better and better directed in the progressive course of knolege and experience. our successors start on our shoulders. they know all that we know, and will add to that stock the discoveries of the next 50. years; and what will be their amount we may estimate from what the last 50. years have added to the science of human concerns. the thoughts of others, as I find them on paper, are my amusement and delight; but the labors of the mind in abstruse investigations are irksome, and writing itself is become a slow and painful operation, occasioned by a stiffened wrist, the consequence of a former dislocation. I will however essay the two definitions which you say are more particularly interesting at present: I mean those of the terms Liberty & Republic, aware however that they have been so multifariously applied as to convey no precise idea to the mind. of Liberty then I would say that, in the whole plenitude of it’s extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will: but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law"; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

Thomas Jefferson, from his letter to Isaac H. Tiffany, April 4. 1819