Freedom . . . is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.

The quotation frames political liberty not as a permanent national possession but as a fragile achievement requiring continual civic effort. By rejecting “inheritance,” it warns against complacency—each generation must actively sustain constitutional norms, democratic habits, and the willingness to resist tyranny. The second sentence intensifies the warning with a historical claim: once a people loses freedom, recovery is rare or comes in a fundamentally altered form. Rhetorically, it functions as a call to vigilance and sacrifice, aligning freedom with moral responsibility and intergenerational duty rather than entitlement.