As true today as the day it was spoken.
Also these:
"Timid men... prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous seas of liberty." --- Thomas Jefferson
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." --- Edmund Burke
"The greatest threats to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." --- Justice Brandeis
"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad...." --- James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798.
"Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction." --- Ronald Reagan
"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors; they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." --- Samuel Adams
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes... known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." --- James Madison, 4th U.S. President, Political Observations, 1795 |
