Thankfully, courageous men and women like Stanislaw Lem found creative ways around evil regimes.

“We look forward to the time,” Gladstone once declared, “when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.”

My personal favorites among Prohibition’s foes were the many jurors who simply refused to convict defendants accused of buying, selling, or drinking illegal booze. They were exercising what legal scholars term the right of “jury nullification.”

What he gave away didn’t make him a hero. That was the easy part. He had to earn it first by serving the countless billions of eager consumers who benefited from his vision and abilities over the decades.

Pilecki’ reports represented a “beacon of hope”—demonstrating that “even in the midst of so much cruelty and degradation there were those who held to the basic virtues of honesty, compassion, and courage.”

Her bulldog determination and her athletic, five-foot-eleven frame intimidated opponents right from the start of a match.

If we more readily associated heroism in war with the courageous resistance to one’s own bellicose government, the world might more often eschew the stupid and jingoistic reasons for which nations frequently shed innocent blood.

Four justices who endured ridicule from the highest places and from men far less principled — as they defended the Constitution that their oaths required. 

Biographer Ellen Gibson Wilson summed him up well: “Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) was almost too good to be true — courageous, visionary, disciplined, self-sacrificing— a man who gave a long life almost entirely to the service of people he never met in lands he never saw.”

All these years later, the thought of him still brings a smile, and some tears as well, to the faces of many people, including me.

Hans Sennholz’s impact on my own life is beyond my capacity to measure. It is arguably greater than that of anyone outside of my own parents, which makes him a hero in a very personal way. 

In the early 1900s, the “progressive” ideology infecting the social sciences was poisoning the nation’s seminaries, too, and Princeton was no exception. Machen was more than a worthy antagonist to the religious left.

Snubbed by “progressive” Franklin Roosevelt because he was black. Disgraceful.

Kellems could get fired up about intrusive government at any level. When the state of Connecticut passed a law in 1947 forbidding women to work after 10:00 p.m., she sprung into action.

She didn’t live long enough to see or possess very much but she found within herself an undying gratitude for what she had — and an awesome ability to communicate it

Cato saw in the ambitious, power-hungry Julius Caesar a mortal threat to the Republic and tried to block his every move. 

As America’s first feminist, and a woman of conscience and principle, Anne Hutchinson planted seeds of libertarianism that would grow and help establish a new nation a little more than a century later.

To Leggett and the Locofocos, the goddess of justice really was blindfolded.

Common to every homeschool parent is the belief that the education of their children is too important to hand over to someone else. Hallelujah for that!

A very different fight that Louis waged is less well known than his boxing. It was with the Internal Revenue Service.