Anarchy Library

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the govenment's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. -- Louis D. Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice, Dissenting, Olmstead v. US, 277 US, 438 (1928)

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts. -- Edmund Burke

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished by default it can never be recovered. -- Dorothy Thompson, article, May, 1958

In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep. -- Albert Einstein

... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. -- Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 13, 1787