“What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.”

The Farmer Refuted (1775)
Context: The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms, and false reasonings, is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator, to the whole human race; and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society.

"I Gave My Smile"
Rewards of Passion (Sheer Poetry) (1981)

Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792)
1790s

Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 256.

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter III, POWER AND LIBERTY A THEORY OF POLITICS, p. 59.

Source: "The Failure of Nonviolence" (2013) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-the-failure-of-nonviolence, Chapter 2. Recuperation is How We Lose

Preface, A vii
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Proclamation to the Mexican people, shortly before the Battle of Puebla of 5 May 1862 (which is commemorated by the "Cinco de Mayo" celebrations).