Burke: "Men are qualified for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free."

Churchill: "No-one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst sort of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

J S Mill: "If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great jointstock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this country free otherwise than in name."

(One time) Czech President Václav: "Illiberal ideas are becoming to be formulated, spread and preached under the name of ideologies or "isms", which have - at least formally and nominally - nothing in common with the old-style, explicit socialism. These ideas are, however, in many respects similar to it. There is always a limiting (or constraining) of human freedom, there is always ambitious social engineering, there is always an immodest 'enforcement of a good' by those who are anointed on others against their will, there is always the crowding out of standard democratic methods by alternative political procedures, and there is always the feeling of superiority of intellectuals and of their ambitions."

Burke: "Nothing can be more absurd and dangerous than to tamper with the natural foundations of society, in hopes of keeping it up by artificial contrivances."

Lord Acton (1834-1902): "The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."

Burke again: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Justice Robert H. Jackson: "It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

Thomas Jefferson: "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." Letter to William Charles Jarvis (September 28, 1820)

Groucho Marx: I am now convinced that politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.