Alarms Quote by James Madison

“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. . . . The freemen of America did not wait till…

— James Madison

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

— James Madison

It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy.…

— Felix Frankfurter

It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy.…

— Felix Frankfurter

“I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever…

— Abraham Lincoln

We see now that infringement of freedom is necessary with regard to the opponents of the revolution. At a time of revolution we cannot…

— Nikolai Bukharin

Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment…

— Ronald Reagan

There comes a time in the history of nations when fear and forgetfulness cause a nation to hesitate, to waver, and perhaps even to…

— Rand Paul

The challenge to our liberties comes frequently not from those who consciously seek to destroy our system of government, but from men of goodwill…

— William O. Douglas

“liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power. . . . [T]he former rather than the latter is…

— Ron Chernow

“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand…

— H.L. Mencken

The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the…

— Woodrow Wilson