Samuel Adams Quotes

Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know the government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed - first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf.

In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and whenever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

Only the checks put upon magistrates (government officials) make nations free; and only the want of such checks make them slaves. They are free, where their magistrates are confined within certain bounds set them by the people … And they are slaves, where the magistrates choose their own rules … and therefore most nations in the world are undone, and those nations only who bridle their governors do not wear chains

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

If people cannot limit government they will not for long be free.

No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave.

Poverty in a democracy is as much to be preferred to what is called prosperity under despots, as freedom is to slavery.

The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.

Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

A republic is not an easy form of government to live under, and when the responsibility of citizenship is evaded, democracy decays and authoritarianism takes over.

I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'.

If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.

It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.

In constitutional states, liberty is compensation for heavy taxes; in dictatorships, the subsititue is light taxes.

Freedom was given to humanity by God. But, governments, if they can help it, never give freedom. They just hand out slavery with slogans.

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters.

It is easy to see that when republican virtue fails, slavery ensues.

In all sorts of government man is made to believe himself free, and to be in chains.

Members of society must obey the law because they personally believe that its commands are justified.

the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Man alone can enslave man.

Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.

As government grows, freedom recedes.