Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
- John Adams

A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.
- John Adams

No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffusd and Virtue is preservd. On the contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.
- Samuel Adams [letter to James Warren, 4 November 1775]

Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' It is a very serious consideration...that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.
- Samuel Adams [speech in Boston, 1771]

The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that `if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' It is a very serious consideration... that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.
- Samuel Adams [speech in Boston, 1771]

If these precedents are to stand unimpeached, and to provide sanctions for the continued conduct of America affairs – the Constitution may be nullified by the President and officers who have taken the oath and are under moral obligation to uphold it... they may substitute personal and arbitrary government – the first principle of the totalitarian system against which it has been alleged that World War II was waged – while giving lip service to the principle of constitutional government.
- Professor Charles Beard [President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948)]

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
- Marie Beyle

The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
- Justice William J. Brennan [1982]

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America.
- Jimmy Carter, American 39th US President, Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002 (1924-)

I think that every true reformer, every real friend of liberty, will agree with me in saying that if we must erect safeguards, they should be rather for the security of the individual than of the mass, and that our chiefest care must be to train the majority to respect the rights of the minority, to prevent the claims of the few from being trampled under foot by the caprice or passion of the many.
- Richard Cartwright in the Legislative Assembly, Canada, March 9, 1865; reproduced in Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles, and William D. Gairdner (Eds.), Canada's Founding Debates, p. 19.

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), Prime Minister of England [November 21, 1943]

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
- Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General [New York Times, Oct. 2, 1977]

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
- Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987)

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.
- Demosthenes [Philippic 2, sect. 24]

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.
- Frederick Douglass

The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.
- William O. Douglas

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
- William O. Douglas

How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General [Reader's Digest, December 1963]

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.
- Ralph Raldo Emerson (1803-1882) [Essays, Second Series (1844)]

Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) [1787, as recorded by Constitution signer James McHenry in a diary entry]

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- Benjamin Franklin

19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society.
- Rocco Galati

My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest... no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak... Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism... true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.
- Gandhi

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.
- Horace Greeley (1811-1872), Editor of the New York Tribune

A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one!
- Alexander Hamilton

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understands the minds of other men and women.
- Learned Hand

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.
- Hebbel (1813-1863), German poet and dramatist

I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.
- Eric Hoffer, speaking on Germany ["The True Believer," http://www.erichoffer.net/ ]

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
- David Hume (1711-1776), Scottish philosopher, historian and economist

But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government.
- Andrew Jackson [Farewell Address, March 4, 1837]

Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President [in a letter to John Adams as quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964) 93]

Law is often the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
- Thomas Jefferson [to I. Tiffany, 1819]

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
- Thomas Jefferson

To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
- Thomas Jefferson

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.
- Thomas Jefferson

"Information is the currency of Democracy." "In matters of style, swim with the current, in matters of principle, stand like a rock" "If all the people knew all the facts, they would never make a mistake." "It is better for one hundred guilty men to go free than one innocent man to go to jail" "It is wrong to take a man's money and use it to promote ideas he does not agree with" "It's better to debate an issue without settling it, than to settle an issue without debate." "The end of democracy, and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations."
- Thomas Jefferson

If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.
- Thomas Jefferson [to Edward Carrington, 1787]

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.
- Thomas Jefferson [September 28, 1820]

What the people want is very simple – they want an America as good as its promise.
- Barbara Jordan

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.'
- Martin Luther King Jr.

Freedom is never an achieved state; like electricity, we've got to keep generating it or the lights go out.
- Wayne LaPierre

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.
- D.H. Lawrence (1885-1938)

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
- C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), British novelist

Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our Fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
- Abraham Lincoln

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step over the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! – All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a Thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th US President [1838]

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
- James Madison

No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue.
- George Mason (1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington

I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
- H.L.Mencken

Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate... Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and.. the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
- H.L. Menchen [1956]

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance.
- Henry Miller (1891-1980) [The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941]

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
- Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965), American Broadcast Newsman

The truth is that men are tired of liberty.
- Mussolini

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
- Thomas Paine

I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809) [The Age of Reason, 1783]

The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.
- Thomas Paine

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
- William Pitt (1759-1806), British Prime Minister (1783-1801, 1804-06) during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars [Speech, House of Commons, 18 November 1783]

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
- Ayn Rand

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals – that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government – that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government.
- Ayn Rand

O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!
- Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland

If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perception.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) [Speech, 30 June 1938]

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
- Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26th US President [letter 01/10/1917]

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.
- Edward W. Said ["Orientalism 25 Years Later," Counterpunch.org, 4 August 2003]

For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.
- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1888-1965)

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
- George Bernard Shaw

A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.
- Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), British author, economist, philosopher [The Principles of Ethics Bd. II, ed. T. Machan, Indianapolis 1978, S. 242-43]

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
- Dorothy Thompson (1894-1961) [Ladies Home Journal, May 1958]

It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way.
- Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard University [interview on ABC's Nightline]

America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.
- Mark Twain

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complaceny to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage.
- Sir Alex Fraser Tyler (1742-1813), Scottish jurist and historian

The most commom way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
- Alice Walker

Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind.
- Henry Grady Weaver (1889-1949), American author, General Motors marketing executive who made the cover of Time in 1938

The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.
- Daniel Webster (1782-1852), US Senator

Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.
- Daniel Webster (1782-1852), US Senator [1851]

...There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing.
- Daniel Webster [June 1, 1837]

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.
- Woodrow Wilson

The rights of all persons are wrapped in the same constitutional bundle as those of the most hated member of the community.
- A. L. Wirin, ACLU Attorney [Time Magazine, 10 February 1978]