Death Is Not The Worst Of Evils

Reprinted from 2008.

Visitors and immigrants from other states snigger at the New Hampshire motto, Live Free or Die. I perceive their thought: Die is just so overdramatic, with more than a whiff of hunters and killing and all those icky gun people. These rubes think they live free even though they're just dumbass rural people with all their resistance to anything new. I mean, how free is that?

The full quote (pronounced quietly, thank you) is Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils. Gen. John Stark wrote that when he was 81, the considered opinion of a citizen soldier who retired back to his farm after the Revolution.

It's a great motto.