By the Times-Enterprise Editorial Board



The following quotes about liberty are offered to our readers with the hope that they serve as an inspiration to get involved in the political process, including Tuesday’s 6 p.m. citizens meeting at the Thomasville Municipal Auditorium:



“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.” — Edmund Burke  



“The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost,how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur.” — James Bovard



“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” — Edmund Burke



“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties…They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.” — Justice Louis D. Brandeis



“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” — Thomas Jefferson



“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” — Thomas Jefferson



“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.” — Thomas Jefferson



“No people will tamely surrender their liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the contrary, when people are universally ignorant, and debauched in their manners, they will sink under their own weight without the aid of foreign Invaders.” — Samuel Adams



“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.” — Ronald Reagan



“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.” — Thomas Paine



“Be not intimidated…nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.” — John Adams



“The approach of liberty makes even an old man brave.” — Lucius Annaeus Seneca



“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” — George Bernard Shaw



“All government, of course, is against liberty.” — H. L. Mencken



“The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.” — Edmund Burke



“‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.” — Friedrich August von Hayek



“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.” — Louis D. Brandeis



“It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.” — John C. Calhoun



“It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.” — Dick Cheney



“Socialism values equality more than liberty.” — Dennis Prager



“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” — Edward Abbey



“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end.” — Lord Acton



“Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.” — John Adams



“The republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it … This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.” — Elmer Davis