After two years of crises, threats to liberty, fears and panic, we can all pray that 2022 will offer opportunities to promote and enjoy peace, prosperity, and liberty for all. Let us look forward!

Although it is just pages on a calendar, most people think of the New Year as a time of new beginnings, opportunities to seize, and a time to forget and get past the mistakes of the past. Let us all take advantage of that attitude in ourselves and others!

Although liberty and freedom are often used interchangeably, they are distinct, and both are valuable. It is said, “Liberty is the right to choose. Freedom is the result of the right choice.” Both are the opposite of what too many people – those in power, in particular – want for anyone but themselves. In 2022, we have the potential to revive and rejuvenate both.

A Baker’s Dozen Thoughts on Liberty and Freedom

Some thoughts to all readers and friends and family for the New Year, as far as our benefits and responsibilities as lovers of liberty:

1. Proclaim liberty throughout the land, and unto all the inhabitants thereof.
2. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
3. Freedom: to walk free and own no man your superior.
4. Where (and when) liberty dwells, there is my country.
5. The secret to happiness is liberty… and the secret to liberty and freedom is courage.
6. I would rather die in freedom on my way home, than starve to death imprisoned here.
7. There is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage.
8. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire or preserve his freedom.
9. Live free or die – death is not the worst of evils.
10. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.
11. It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it taken from you.
12. The secret of liberty lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is keeping people ignorant. And then, of course:
13. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

I have intentionally left out the citations and authors/speakers of these bits of wisdom, and challenge readers to try and name at least some of them – remembering that some of them may prove surprising indeed. I also did not always exactly quote – I took artistic liberty in writing these out.

Think on these things as we begin 2022.