Every generation of Americans need to know that freedom…

Page 68. Every generation of Americans need to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

— from True North (Ethics, Integrity, Truth, Values)

In the book

Marcus Aurelius began each day reminding himself that the people he'd meet would be ungrateful, arrogant, and dishonest — and that he would not let any of them implicate him in ugliness or turn him hard, because we were born to work together like the two hands, the two eyes, the upper and lower rows of teeth. And freedom, properly understood, is the engine of all of it: freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought. That, in the end, is what the old question "how should I live?" is really asking — about the proper orientation of everything you do, your true north, your moral center. — True North (Ethics, Integrity, Truth, Values)

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