Daily Inspiration Quote by Dave Sim

Sim’s line lands like a trapdoor under a feel-good slogan. He anticipates the audience’s expected liberal reflex - “men should be free” - and then yanks it away with a cold, almost parental verdict: the average person is a hazard, so liberty must be rationed. It’s a piece of rhetoric that works by staging a debate and winning it in the first sentence, ventriloquizing the counterargument only to brand it naive.

The intent is provocation, but not the cheap kind. Sim is targeting the sentimental definition of freedom as an automatic moral good. By calling the “free man” dangerous “to himself and everyone else,” he reframes liberty as a technical skill, closer to handling a weapon or driving a car than reciting a right. The subtext is elitist and disciplinary: most people can’t be trusted with autonomy, so someone must decide who qualifies. That “those who can put it to good use” is doing authoritarian work while sounding reasonable; it’s competence language as a mask for control.

Context matters because Sim isn’t a politician; he’s a cartoonist who built Cerebus in opposition to polite consensus, mixing high-minded philosophy with contrarian spleen. Coming from that ecosystem, the quote reads less like policy and more like a diagnosis of human frailty - and a dare. It invites readers to ask whether “freedom” is an ethical principle or a privilege granted by whoever claims to know what “good use” looks like. The real sting is that the sentence can indict both mob impulses and the paternalists who exploit fear of them.