Quote o' the Day

I recently signed up at www.just-quotes.com to get a daily e-mail with -- what else? -- some quotations in it. It's long been a sort of innocent vice of mine that I enjoy finding quotes and sayings in rather random ways. (I used to love the boxes of Celestial Seasonings teas for this, until the formerly small private company got big, went corporate and lost its personality.) I call this a vice because I'm enough of a rhetorician that I cannot in good conscience avoid acknowledging the perils of quoting out of context; my real vice, then, is the fact that I hardly ever hunt down the original context for these things.*

Anyway, today's e-mail contained the following, which I particularly like. (And which, I think, holds little risk of great misrepresentation or misinterpretation when taken on its own.)

"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."

-- Edmund Burke
(1729-1797)

Irish Orator, Statesman

Oddly enough, one of my other frequently-visited quotation sites had this today:

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

-- Clarence Darrow
(1857-1938)
American Lawyer

Both thoughts well worth remembering.



(*I am also guilty on rare occasions of knowingly taking a quote out of context, although this is usually only in the most casual of uses. The most acute exception is a snippet from Augustine with which I fell in love at first sight. It was, as I first saw it: "Love, and do what you will."
Of course it was inevitable that context was going to constrain it. What saddened me more deeply was the discovery that the out-of-context quote was also a sloppy -- or at least loose -- translation. The phrase is "Dilige et quod vis fac." The "love" referred to is not from amo -are [to love (passionately); fall in love with, be fond of] but rather dilige, from diligo -ligere [to choose out; to prize , love, esteem highly]. The distinction -- and this is coming from my extremely rusty undergrad Latin -- seems to steer the intention away from the romantic or passionate love with which I'd originally associated it. This ought not be surprising, given Augustine's post-conversion attitude towards the passions of his youth, but I was nonetheless disappointed. In my heart, yet restless though it most definitely is, I want it to be Ama et quod vis fac.)