Personally, I like Rhode Island's. "Hope" is something that works for all times. "By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty," is somewhat caught in time. It might work well during war times, but it doesn't really offer anything during peace times. It's the kind of thing that you adopt in 1775 when the main concern of the day is the revolution. It feels like New York deciding in 2002 to make their motto, "9/11, Never Forget."

To me, it doesn't capture the spirit of Massachusetts which has been based in hard work, education, experimentation, and intellectualism for most of its history. We're the state of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott. Of the first 12 presidents, the only two non-slaveholders were from Massachusetts. We're the state Horace Mann, advocate for public education. We're the state of the Massachusetts 54th and W. E. B. Du Bois. We're the state of Senator Sumner whose outspoken abolitionist views saw him beaten on the Senate floor. We're the state where the telephone was invented, where anesthesia was first used for surgery, where the first routers were made to enable the ARPANET (the US-government precursor to the internet), and the hub of mRNA research.

In some ways I guess it does capture Massachusetts. Even when preparing for war, we put an intellectual spin on it - that peace is only worthwhile under liberty. Still, it feels a bit trapped in time for me. It feels like the 1770s preserved in amber rather than something that continues to apply to our modern life.