"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change."
- Shelley

"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear."
- Macaulay

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone"
- Bastiat

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
- Emerson

"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
- de Tocqueville

"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury."
- Stuart Mill

"Our reliance is the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors."
- Lincoln

"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
- Douglass

"This American government – what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?"
- Thoreau

"No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy. Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society."
- Spencer

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."
- Acton