Who God abandons, I defend.

Mike Ramsey

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace.  We seek not your counsel, nor your arms.  Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you.  May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. 

Sam Adams

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt. 

John Philpot Curran

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. 

Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure. 

Thomas Jefferson

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. 

Benjamin Franklin

The history of liberty is a history of resistance.  The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. 

Woodrow Wilson

Mankind is tired of liberty.  

Benito Mussolini

Who are a free people?  Not those over whom government is reasonably exercised, but those who live under a government so constitutionally checked and controlled that proper provision is made against its being otherwise exercised. 

John Dickinson

Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. 

James Madison

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. 

Abraham Lincoln 

What citizen of a free country would listen to any offers of good and skillful administration in return for the abdication of freedom? 

J.S. Mill

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.  

Nikolai Lenin

Liberty is precious -- so precious that it must be rationed.  

V.I. Lenin

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-ridden, regulated, penned up, indoctrinated, preached at, checked, appraised, seized, censured, commanded, by beings who have neither title, nor knowledge, nor virtue.  To be governed is to have every operation, every transaction, every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, indorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected. 

P.J. Proudhon:  Confessions d'un révolutionaire, 1849

Government consists of acts done by human beings; and if the agents, or those who choose the agents, or those to whom the agents are responsible, or the lookers-on whose opinion ought to influence and check all these, are mere masses of ignorance, stupidity, and baleful prejudice, every operation of government will go wrong. 

J.S. Mill

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. 

H.D. Thoreau

I consider all the encroachments made on the constitution heretofore as nothing, as mere retail stuff, compared with the wholesale doctrine that there is a Common Law in force in the United States, of which, and of all the cases within its provisions, their courts have cognizance. 

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Charles Pinckney, Oct. 1799

The lawyer is always in a hurry. 

Plato

If the advocate refuses to defend from what he may think of the charge or of the defense, he assumes the character of the judge; nay, he assumes it before his hour of judgment; and, in proportion to his rank and reputation, puts the heavy influence of, perhaps, a mistaken opinion into the scale against the accused. 

Thomas Erskine:  On the trial of Thomas Paine for publishing The Rights of Man, 1792

Woe unto ye also, ye lawyers!  for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be born, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers. 

Luke XI, 46

Lawyers, like bread [are best] when they are young and new. 

Thomas Fuller

These are the mountebanks of state, . . . 
The mastiffs of a government, 
To worry and run down the innocent. 

Daniel Defoe:  A Hymn to the Pillory, 1703

A lawyer's opinion is worth nothing unless paid for. 

English Proverb, not recorded before the 19th century

If you cannot avoid a quarrel with a blackguard let your lawyer manage it rather than yourself.  No man sweeps his own chimney but employs a chimney-sweeper who has no objection to dirty work, because it is his trade. 

C.C. Colton

Most good lawyers live well, work hard, and die poor. 

Daniel Webster

It is a strange trade, that of advocacy.  Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift, hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale, will either blow out a pestilent scoundrel's brains, or the scoundrel's salutary sheriff's officer's (in a sense), as you please to choose for your guinea. 

Thomas Carlyle