Replies

Forgot to include a couple of select quotes in response to your quotes:

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
— Daniel Webster (1782 - 1852)

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt, 1783

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.
Attributed to Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)

Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass, Aug. 4, 1857

'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'."
C.S. Lewis

"Attack another's rights and you destroy your own."
John Jay Chapman

Another from Madison about this topic: "It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."
James Madison

"The greatest danger to American freedom is a government that ignores the Constitution."
Thomas Jefferson

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable."
Teddy Roosevelt (during World War I)

"The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty."
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

"Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety."
Daniel Webster

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
James Madison

"If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves?"
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
Justice William O. Douglas

The privacy and dignity of our citizens (are) being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a (person's) life."
Justice William O. Douglas