It was a sudden vanishing of all the menacing things that characterize the Soviet Union, the shadowy intrusions that you can feel but cannot see. Throughout all the long, cooperative working hours, underlying the jovial ceremonies, lurking beneath the flash of crystal, the flow of vodka, the unspoken awareness of unseen oppression had been with each of us. We too had felt unfree. And it was then, for the first time, that I could put into words that sense of a deep, unnamable difference between the Soviet officials and myself. It was the difference between men who have never known freedom and men who were born free.
Freedom is strangely ephemeral.
Similarly, it is only when one confronts political tyranny that one really grasps the meaning and importance of freedom. Our Founding Fathers, in whom I grow progressively more interested as I grow older, were well aware of this. One of the British philosophers who influenced their thought most profoundly was John Locke. In other words, government's power, said Locke, was logically limited to the protection of each individual's right to his life, his liberty, and his property, and any government that interfered with these rights instead of protecting them was illegitimate. Our Founding Fathers, intellectual heirs of Locke, consciously and deliberately created the first limited government in the history of man.