“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.” — Abraham Lincoln
As Americans celebrate 250 years of their freedom, LiveMint's quote of the day by Abraham Lincoln, the 16th US President who navigated the country through the Civil War, serves as a devastating critique of hypocrisy.
Lincoln argued that freedom is a universal human right, not a conditional privilege that one group can hoard for itself while denying it to another.
When Lincoln said, “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves,” he was applying a political version of the Golden Rule. He is pointing out the fundamental absurdity of a slave-owning society demanding its own liberties.
If you do not believe that freedom is an inherent human right belonging to everyone, then you have no logical or moral foundation to claim that it belongs to you. You cannot logically demand rights that you refuse to grant.
The second half, “...and, under a just God, can not long retain it,” operates as a stark warning. Lincoln is asserting that a society built on a foundation of profound injustice is inherently unstable. He believed that the universe operates on a moral arc, and that a nation cannot survive half-slave and half-free. Eventually, the weight of that hypocrisy will cause the society to collapse, either through divine justice, internal rebellion, or war.
Two years later, the outbreak of the Civil War would prove this warning accurate.
Lincoln was specifically targeting a twisted political argument of his era. Southern politicians frequently used the language of "liberty" and "states' rights" to defend slavery. They argued that the federal government was infringing on their "freedom" to own human beings. Lincoln used this quote to cut through that rhetoric, exposing that their version of "freedom" was just tyranny in disguise.
Lincoln’s warning that freedom cannot be selectively applied remains one of the most relevant political and moral principles today. When a society treats rights as a zero-sum game—where one group can only secure its freedoms by stripping them from another—the entire system becomes unstable.
Abraham Lincoln wrote this on 6 April 1859 in a letter to a Massachusetts politician named Henry L. Pierce.
Pierce and a committee of Boston Republicans had invited Lincoln to attend a festival celebrating Thomas Jefferson's birthday. Lincoln had to decline the invitation because of his busy schedule, but he used the letter to make a powerful political statement about the state of the country.
Check out the paragraph where the quote appeared to understand the full weight of his words. Lincoln noted that if a man does not want to be a slave, he must refuse to be a master:
“This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it. All honour to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times...”
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