Here are some quotes about freedom and liberty, from some of the great minds and learned men of our nation (and from around the world) over our history:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free

Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit.

I don't believe in a government that protects us from ourselves

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.

America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, 'You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won't become a German or a Turk.' But then he added, 'Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.'

- Ronald Reagan

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.

-FDR

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

-Frederick Douglass

Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.

-JFK

For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.

-Sam Adams

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

~Thomas Paine

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.

-Woodrow Wilson

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

-Mahatma Gandhi

Perfect freedom is as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it is to the health and vigor of citizenship.

-Patrick Henry

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry is own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

-Pope John Paul II

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

-Virginia Woolf

They were singing in French, but the melody was freedom and any American could understand that.

-Audie Murphy

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

-Pearl S. Buck

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

-William Faulkner

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

Both the first quote, from Ronald Reagan (our 40th president), and this last quote, by James Madison, our fourth president and the man regarded as the "Father of the Constitution", seem to have a particular poignancy and relevance as this Congress and Administration seek to feed the voraciuos appetite for growth of our Federal Government, its tentacles intruding deeper and deeper into our lives. We take so much for granted, I hope these quotes inspire some of us to pay a little more attention to what is going on in our nation, before it is too late.