Life & Wisdom Quote by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Fisher’s line takes a blunt swing at the feel-good word “freedom,” yanking it away from flag-waving abstraction and forcing it to answer a practical moral question: freedom for what, and for whom? The sentence is engineered like a trap. It starts with the sacred premise - freedom is worth fighting for - then snaps shut on the hollow version of it that too often passes as patriotism: “license,” the pseudo-freedom of unrestrained grabbing.

The subtext is a critique of an American habit: translating liberty into consumer entitlement and calling the resulting scramble “individualism.” By choosing “as much as he can,” Fisher doesn’t just condemn selfishness; she sketches an entire social order built on extraction, where the strong treat public life like a clearance sale. The phrase “for himself” lands as a moral indictment, narrowing freedom down to a lonely pronoun. What’s missing is the point: obligation, mutual restraint, shared flourishing - the parts of democracy that don’t sell as cleanly as rugged self-reliance.

Context matters. Fisher wrote and lived through eras when “freedom” was a rallying cry with real stakes: industrial exploitation, world war, the rise of mass propaganda, and the New Deal fights over whether government could be a tool for collective security rather than a threat to liberty. Her intent reads as civic triage: if freedom is merely the right to outcompete your neighbor, it’s not a cause; it’s a permission slip for inequality. The line works because it refuses sentimentality. It doesn’t ask you to cherish freedom. It asks you to define it, and then to pay for it ethically.