An
emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to
act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to
grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their
skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault
with everything.
(Address of the Duke of Shao to King
Li-Wang, ca 845 B.C.)
Though
liberty is established by law, we must be vigilant, for liberty to
enslave us is always present under that very liberty. Our Constitution
speaks of the "general welfare of the people." Under that phrase all
sorts of excesses can be employed by lusting tyrants to make us bondsmen.
Too
long have we said to ourselves "intolerance of another's politics is
barbarous and not to be countenanced in a civilized country. Are we not
free? Shall a man be denied his right to speak under the law which
established that right?" I tell you that freedom does not mean the
freedom to exploit law in order to destroy it! It is not freedom which
permits the Trojan Horse to be wheeled within the gates. He who is not
for Rome and Roman Law and Roman liberty is against Rome. He who
espouses tyranny and oppression and the old dead despotisms is against
Rome. He who plots against established authority and incites the
populace to violence is against Rome. He cannot ride two horses at the
same time. We cannot be for lawful ordinances and for an alien
conspiracy at one and the same moment.
Cicero (106–43 BC) Second Oration before the Roman Senate
Few
men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
We
may look up to Armies for our Defense, but Virtue is our best
Security. It is not possible that any State should long remain free,
where Virtue is not supremely honored.
Men
are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition
to put moral chains upon their own appetites...
Society
cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed
somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
The
alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit
of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries
has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful
despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent
despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the
minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an
individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more
able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the
purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
I
believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the
people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent
and sudden usurpations.
The
shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep
thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the
same act as the destroyer of liberty.
Liberty
never came from government. The history of liberty is a history
of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of
governmental power, not the increase of it.
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) Speech in New York, September 9, 1912
If
a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and
the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will
lose that, too.
The
trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's
time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive
laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is
to be stopped at all.