Thomas Jefferson -

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

Roger Q. Mills, 1887 -

Prohibition was introduced as a fraud; it has been nursed as a fraud. It is wrapped in the livery of Heaven, but it comes to serve the devil. It comes to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives. It comes to tear down liberty and build up fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance. It comes to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. It comes to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments. It comes to dissipate the sunlight of happiness, peace, and prosperity in which we are now living and to fill our land with alienations, estrangements, and bitterness. It comes to bring us evil -- only evil -- and that continually. Let us rise in our might as one and overwhelm it with such indignation that we shall never hear of it again as long as grass grows and water runs.

On the Singularity -

No matter who produces it, I don’t expect moonbattery, or partisanship for that matter, to survive it. What possible advantage can there be to willful blindness, when everything is effortlessly accessible to anyone? or to mendacity and evasion, when the truth can be had for the price of looking? or to obfuscation, when there is no longer any such thing as an intellectual thicket? or to stridency, when it no longer has any power to distract? What will the worth of a slogan be, when anyone can effortlessly understand the whole? Where would there be any incentive left for groupthink? Clayton Jones via Daily Pundit

Wendell Phillips -

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity. -Link-

Janet Albrechtson -

Left-wing politics is essentially an emotional, instinctive Utopian kind of world peopled by romantics and dreamers. Conservatism is, on the other hand, more rational, analytical and pragmatic. That is why creative types tend to come from the Left. Right-wingers, by contrast, have real jobs.