Daily Inspiration Quote by E. P. Thompson

The line lands like an invoice for stolen time. Thompson takes a phrase usually used to excuse power - "taking liberties" - and flips it into an accusation: the state isn't expanding freedom, it's appropriating it. The kicker is the tense. "For two decades" reads as evidence, not outrage in the moment; the grievance has accrued interest. And "were once ours" turns liberty from an abstract ideal into property with a prior owner, implying dispossession and a paper trail.

Thompson is writing in the long shadow of Britain's postwar settlement, when the administrative state grew alongside welfare promises, policing capacities, and a culture of official secrecy. As a historian of working-class formation and a critic of top-down authority, he's alert to how rights don't simply erode; they're quietly converted into permissions. The subtext is that freedom has been reframed as something granted by institutions rather than practiced by citizens - a shift that can happen without coups or dramatic crackdowns, through forms, regulations, surveillance, and the slow normalization of deference.

The sentence also has Thompson's signature moral angle: liberty is collective and fought for, not a private lifestyle choice. "Ours" isn't just nostalgic; it's political. He's invoking a memory of hard-won civic space - the right to organize, dissent, move untracked, live without constant managerial oversight - and warning that a population can be pacified into surrendering it, even while believing it's being protected. The genius is its economy: no policy list, just the unsettling suggestion that you can lose freedom while still calling your country free.