"Bitter? Yes, I'm bitter, in a way. All my life I've devoted myself to following the inquiry into the nature of Nature. This pursuit has led me--by way of psychology--into finding out a great deal about what is popularly called the nature of God. But now, knowledge at the source is restricted, classified, forbidden, secret--to protect the damned atom bomb. My government, as a security measure, has cut off my inquiry into God, my power to extend my own religion, my equivalent of your faith, my access to truth. Perhaps I'd never even manage to persuade anybody that the time has come to connect instinct and energy by theory. But the _right_ that I hold most valuable has been taken from me. And from you. And from everybody--if they stopped to think. Freedom--that precious necessity--is _actually_ freedom for the mind. There is no other pure liberty. All other freedoms stem from intellectual freedom--but all others are qualified by the material, social, political, and spiritual desires of people. What we call liberty in America is the right to know and to change: to extend or limit this liberty for the sake of that advantage or because of that prejudice--and then to learn better and shift the position once again--and so on forever. That is all there is to liberty insofar as it concerns behavior. But when the behavior of the mind is circumscribed, liberty is dead in its one absolute sense. It is dead today. We live in a midnight imposed by fear--a time like all dark ages. Truth and learning have gone underground. I am forbidden to know any more. What I think might be centuries in advance of what common people are thinking. It is still--at least potentially--obsolete, or inadequate, in relation to what other men may know--that I am not allowed by my government to find out. Wouldn't you be bitter--or sad--if your church were shut up by the Congress, if you were forbidden to learn more about your God, and if you were obliged to confine even your thinking to bootlegged guesses?" "It's a pretty remote argument," he said. "Is it? Remote to destroy the source of freedom?" "Would you have us tell the Soviets how to make a bomb?" "Is that the question? They know how! You have been told and told and told that they know how and have known since the Smythe Report appeared. And even that's not the point. When it became evident that the people of the United States faced the alternatives of maintaining the freedom of knowledge--at the risk of atomic conflict--or of destroying liberty at the source to gain the dubious advantage of a few years' time--the people chose the phony safety of secrecy for a mere unknowable dozens of months. They were too dumb to see they had sold their birthright." "What would you have done?"