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You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down - up to a man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order - or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Ronald Reagan#25

PoliticsFreedomSecurityTotalitarianism

About this quote

What does it mean?
The quote argues there is no left or right, only upward freedom or downward totalitarianism, framing security vs. liberty as a choice.
In plain terms
Politics is not left or right, but freedom or totalitarianism.
What can you take from it?
View political choices as tradeoffs between freedom and control.

Where it applies

  • policy debates
  • philosophical discussions
  • voter education

Putting it to work

  • frame policy debates
  • evaluate security tradeoffs
  • define liberty

Questions to consider

  • Is security always a tradeoff with liberty?
  • Can freedom and order coexist?

Another view

It oversimplifies political spectra into binary choices.

More from Ronald Reagan

  1. The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.

    Permalink to quote #24
  2. Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call …

    Permalink to quote #26
  3. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has …

    Permalink to quote #23

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