Success Quote by Charles Evans Hughes

Hughes turns “different” into the pressure point of democracy: not a quirky lifestyle choice, but a protected status that makes freedom real. The line works because it flips what many people assume freedom means. We tend to treat liberty as the baseline and difference as the messy byproduct. Hughes reverses it: difference is the condition that proves liberty exists. If a society only tolerates one acceptable way to think, worship, speak, or live, “freedom” becomes a decorative word pasted over conformity.

The phrasing is legalistic but not bloodless. “Right” signals something enforceable, not a favor granted by the majority. “Privilege” is a sly, almost austere choice: freedom isn’t framed as a guaranteed comfort; it’s something you can forfeit when you let the state (or the crowd) crush deviation in the name of order. That’s the subtext: rights don’t just protect the unpopular; they protect everyone from the momentary moral panics that make repression feel righteous.

Context matters because Hughes wasn’t a poet; he was a jurist steeped in the American tension between unity and pluralism during an era of intense “Americanization,” labor conflict, and war-driven suspicion of dissent. For a judge, “different” is a stand-in for the litigant no one wants to defend: the dissenter, the minority faith, the radical pamphleteer. The sentence reads like a warning from inside the machine: once the law stops making room for outliers, it stops making room for you.