The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. -- Edmund Burke

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt. -- John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790. (Speeches. Dublin, 1808.)

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. -- Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1791.

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

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined. -- Patrick Henry, Virginia's Ratification convention, 1788

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government purposes are beneficent...The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding. -- Justice Louis Brandeis

In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me. -- Rev. Martin Niemoeller, German Lutheran pastor arrested by the Gestapo in 1938. He was sent to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he remained until he was freed by the Allied forces in 1945.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. -- Dante, The Inferno

To protect liberty of conscience is the duty of the state, and this is the limit of its authority in matters of religion. Every secular government that attempts to regulate or enforce religious observances by civil authority, is sacrificing the very principle for which the evangelical Christians so nobly struggled. - E.G. White

I know not what course others may take but as for me: give me liberty or give me death. -- Patrick Henry