William E. Simon on FREEEEEEDOM

"Freedom is difficult to understand because it isn't a presence but an absence -- an absence of governmental constraint. People who are unfamiliar with severe political constraints -- severe enough to make them aware that they have lost their freedom -- often don't know what freedom is and on what it depends.

"This was true of me, and it tends to be generally true of Americans, who have had the unique privilege of living in a nation that was organized, constitutionally and economically, for one purpose above all: to protect that freedom. Our Founding Fathers, for whom the knowledge of the centuries of tyranny that had preceded them was vivid and acute, were guided in the creation of our political and economic system by that knowledge; virtually every decision they made was to bind the state in chains to protect the individual's freedom of thought, choice, and action -- to protect that ephemeral thing called freedom."

[Excerpted from A Time For Truth by William E. Simon, 1979, pg. 21]