Heroes of Liberty from around the Globe

If men and women were robots, “liberty” would be meaningless. The only question would be who (or what) should be the programmer.

Humans are emphatically not robots. Not in the slightest. Each of us is a unique, one-of-a-kind, non-repeatable person. That’s why the would-be social programmers in our midst fail. Their attempts to push you around according to their agendas—even when they claim it’s for your own good—inevitably produce conflict, chaos, and tyranny.

Enter heroes for liberty, that indispensable minority willing to take on the programmers. They are not peculiar to any region of the world or to a particular time period or to one sex. They hail from all nationalities, races, faiths, and creeds. They inspire others to a noble and universal cause—that all people should be free to live their lives in peace so long as they do no harm to the equal rights of others. They are passionate not solely for their own liberty, but for that of others as well.

In my last book, Real Heroes: Inspiring True Stories of Courage, Character and Conviction, I wrote about 40 individuals whose views, decisions, and actions served this cause in various ways. That book planted the seed for a weekly series published on FEE.org from December 2017 to May 2018. I was the editor and not the author for the essays in that series, and I was content to keep the edits to a minimum to preserve the author’s voice. Each author wrote about heroes for liberty who are (or were) citizens of his or her own country. Those essays now comprise the chapters in this eBook.

The lives of the men and women profiled here are testimonies to the best qualities of humanity. You’ll read stories of courage, of creativity, of great intellect, and of the immense power that emanates from principled character.

The world has always been full of people who seek to do harm. Thank God the world is also a place liberally sprinkled with the uncommonly good, the heroes who by their ideas, their work and their examples have left that world a far better place than it could ever be in their absence.