“The encroachments upon liberty in the reigns of the first James and the first Charles, by turning the general attention of learned men to government, are said to have produced the greatest number of consummate statesmen which has ever been seen in any age or nation.”
1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
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John Adams 202
2nd President of the United States 1735–1826Related quotes
As quoted in The Peter Plan : A Proposal for Survival (1976) by Laurence J. Peter
1970s
Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 417
Written by Henry Stuber as part of a biographical sketch of Franklin appended to a 1793 edition of Franklin's autobiography and sometimes reprinted with it in the 19th century. It is frequently misattributed to Franklin himself.
Misattributed
From The Liberty to Trade as Buttressed by National Law (1909) by George H. Earle, Jr.
The Great Infidels (1881)
Context: The greatest men the world has produced have known but little. They had a few facts, mingled with mistakes without number. In some departments they towered above their fellows, while in others they fell below the common level of mankind.
Essay Fourth, The Principles of the Former Essays Applied to Government
A New View of Society (1813-1816)
“The two greatest things that all men aim at in any free government are liberty and permanency.”
Legislative Assembly, February 9, 1865
Context: The two greatest things that all men aim at in any free government are liberty and permanency. We have had liberty enough - too much perhaps in some respects - but at all events, liberty to our hearts content.
Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention, v. 1, p. 299. (June 19, 1787)
Debates of the Federal Convention (1787)
Dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1928). The last sentence is one of many quotations inscribed on Cox Corridor II, a first floor House corridor, U.S. Capitol.
Judicial opinions
Context: The defendants' objections to the evidence obtained by wire-tapping must, in my opinion, be sustained. It is, of course, immaterial where the physical connection with the telephone wires leading into the defendants' premises was made. And it is also immaterial that the intrusion was in aid of law enforcement. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government'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.