For those who do not understand the difference between license and liberty, license involves annoying and sometimes unnecessary restrictions; liberty, in the immortal words of Huck Finn, is doing or saying what you think is right. License hems in by countless fine print, all written by Yale or Harvard lawyers. Liberty is a Charles Ives symphony, two bands playing martial music passing each other in the night like boisterous ships in opposite directions. Liberty is as free and open as an American garden; license is an English garden – orderly, precise, jackbooted. Liberty feels and sounds like a family discussion around an American supper table on some festive occasion, noisy and borderless. Like the American garden, such conversations are free ranging and diverse, to make use of a much abused word: Here a wildflower is sunk in a field of unkempt grass, nestled by a rushing brook that waters the roots of a hundred year old oak casting its shade over the sun speckled landscape. The Ameri...
go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you;
may your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"
--Samuel Adams