Time & Perspective Quote by John E. Moss

Liberty rarely vanishes with a drumroll; it slips out the side door while everyone is watching something else. John E. Moss, a politician best known for prying open the federal government with the Freedom of Information Act, is warning that the real threat to democratic rights is procedural, incremental, and boring. That is the quote's bite: it reframes crisis not as a single villainous act but as an accumulation of small, plausibly deniable choices.

The subtext is institutional. "Gradually and quietly" points to how power expands through memos, exceptions, and administrative habits: a new classification rule here, a broadened surveillance authority there, a norm of deference to "national security" that becomes the default setting. Moss understood that secrecy is not just the absence of information; it is an environment where accountability cannot breathe. If citizens can't see what government is doing, they cannot object in time, and the loss of liberty gets laundered into routine.

The intent is also self-indicting, which makes it politically potent. Coming from a politician, the line implicates lawmakers, agencies, and the public in the same slow-motion failure. It denies the comfort of thinking freedom is lost only to coups and dictators; it can be traded away through exhaustion, fear, or convenience, especially when each individual trade seems minor.

Moss is offering a test of civic attention: the health of a free society is measured less by its grand declarations than by the quiet paperwork it tolerates.