Life & Wisdom Quote by William Safire

Safire’s line is a neat little demolition of a modern dodge: the habit of treating legality as a moral alibi. It’s not a sweeping sermon; it’s a scalpel. By setting “the right” against “right,” he exploits English’s most slippery word to expose how easily we smuggle ethics into the language of entitlement. The sentence reads like common sense because it’s built like a tautology that refuses to be one. You can almost hear the courtroom cadence in it, then feel the pivot into the realm law can’t fully police: conscience, norms, decency.

The intent is corrective, and pointedly so. Safire isn’t arguing against rights; he’s arguing against the triumphalism that sometimes comes with them. In American public life, especially in the late 20th century, debates over free speech, privacy, protest, and press power often collapsed into a single move: “I’m allowed.” Safire, a longtime political columnist and language hawk, knew that move was rhetorically convenient precisely because it short-circuits harder questions about harm, responsibility, and social trust.

The subtext is a warning about a culture that confuses “can” with “should.” Rights are floors, not halos. They protect us from coercion; they don’t automatically confer virtue on whatever we do inside the protected zone. The line works because it restores friction between law and ethics without handing censors a weapon: you may have the liberty, Safire implies, but you still owe the rest of us a reckoning.