“Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.”
"Circular to the States" (8 June 1783) http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch7s5.html <br class="br">1780s
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George Washington186
first President of the United States 1732–1799Related quotes
Fisher Ames (1758–1808) American politician
The Dangers of American Liberty (1805), in [Ames, Fisher, and Seth Ames, Works of Fisher Ames: with a selection from his speeches and correspondence, 1854, Little, Brown, 349, Boston, http://books.google.com/books?id=fjoOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA349&vq=known+propensity]
John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States
No. 3
1770s, Novanglus essays (1774–1775)
Elbridge Gerry (1744–1814) US diplomat and vice president; Massachusetts governor
House of Representatives, Amendments to the Constitution, 17, 20 Aug. 1789 http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendIIs6.html
“In established interests are the most powerful force of resistance to good.”
Daniel Salamanca (1863–1935) President of Bolivia (1863-1935)
“Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.”
Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia
History and Utopia (1960)
Montesquieu book The Spirit of the Laws
A government may be so constituted, as no man shall be compelled to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to abstain from things which the law permits.
Book XI, Chapter 4.
The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer
On the title of her book Love (2003), in O, The Oprah Magazine (November 2003) http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/200311/omag_200311_toni_b.jhtml <br class="br">Context: It is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion — because hatred is involved in it, too. I thought if I removed the word from nearly every other place in the manuscript, it could become an earned word. If I could give the word, in my very modest way, its girth and its meaning and its terrible price and its clarity at the moment when that is all there is time for, then the title does work for me.