Related:

• The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with the power to endanger the public liberty.
  -- John Adams (1772)...
• If the liberties of the American people are every destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the Clergy.
  -- General Marquis de Lafayette, 1789...
• Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have .
  ..a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the character and conduct of their rulers....
• Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
• That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience
  or to prevent the people of the United states who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms....
• A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselve
  consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks....
• People who pursue their own intellectual interests for purely personal reasons are more likely to benefit the rest of the world than are people who try to act for the public good.
• The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it is cheaper to do this than to institutionalize all those people.
• The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.