The above quotation is attributed to the Irish orator, John Philpot Curran, of which, the message of this insightful advice is that liberty, or all forms of freedom, necessitates that the people hold to account, those that are in the position to uphold that liberty or to take such away, and whenever that liberty is threatened, the people have a responsibility through their vigilance to do what needs to be done to defend liberty, or else it is the people that will ultimately pay the price for their failure to maintain that eternal watchfulness.
We live now in a day and age in which an argument could be and should be made, that the liberty that Americans take as their birthright is under assault, both implicitly as well as explicitly, as we see demonstrated again and again, by the fact that those that band together in civil disobedience and therefore should be protected by the law, as per their 1st Amendment rights, are themselves often harassed or suffer even worse by the policing arm of the state, which is exceedingly militarized and has little hesitation in asserting itself, and cares not a whit about the non-liberty actions that it subsequently takes, because the law and order so being imposed upon the people of America, answers not to the people, but to those elites that are above the law.
All rights, in order to be successfully held, require the people to be eternally vigilant, because the nature of governance often appears to be to concentrate on using its power to get done what those at the highest levels of government and beyond desire to get done, which frequently means that their toleration of the people in regards to civil disobedience or other actions of that ilk, demonstrates very little patience to hear what the people have to say, or to even concern themselves about such.
In life, the most important things that we desire require sacrifice, dedication, determination, and principled action. When those skillsets are lacking, because the people believe that their rights appear to be safely ensconced in the Constitution, the people, therefore have made the cardinal error of believing that words trump what is occurring in front of their faces, in which, the net result that we are seeing is that liberty has been restricted, sometimes under the guise that such is temporarily needed to be enforced for the safety of the people. Other times, more boldly, it is stated that the government simply knows best.
Indeed, it needs to be recognized that those in power, are always outnumbered by those that have little or no power, of which, the fact that the people are at liberty, makes it therefore much more problematic that the effective rulers of this nation, can implement and get done what they so desire to get done for their expressed benefit, which is why so often nowadays, there is a concentrated effort to manipulate, control, and to steer the population into the belief that liberty should be circumscribed, for the protection and the betterment of the people, which thereby takes away their inherent right to freedom and replaces it with a shadow and hollow liberty, which isn’t true liberty, at all.