"Newps" wrote in message
. ..


Private wrote:


The threats to our freedoms do NOT come from outside our borders.

At all? Really?

External forces may threaten many things, but we ourselves are the greatest
threat to our own freedom.

I think Ben Franklin's (attributed) words said it best "Those who would
give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve
neither Liberty nor Safety."

Some other thoughts on the matter,

John Adams
Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of
your
liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency.
These, as
they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy,
chicanery and cowardice.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect
liberty
when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom
are
naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious
encroachment
by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Samuel Adams
The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution,
are
worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them
against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance
from
our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and
danger
and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with
care
and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the
present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them
to be
wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out
of
them by the artifices of false and designing men.

Lyn Nofziger
One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in the
country that security is more important than freedom. It ain't.

Thomas Jefferson
Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it?
Or
will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom?
Material abundance without character is the path of destruction.

Vance Packard
The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation
by
surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard.
Their
mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.

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

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where
the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act
only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human
history, the stage of rule by brute force. Ayn Ran

Edmund Burke
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by
parts."

"Liberty has never come from the government.... The history of liberty is
the history of resistance...a history of the limitation of governmental
power, not the increase of it." --Woodrow Wilson

'Eternal Vigilance Is The Price of Liberty' used to mean we watched the
government - not the other way around.

"A conservative is a liberal that's been mugged.
A libertarian is a conservative that's been mugged by his government."

"There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people
by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by
violent
and sudden usurpation." James Madison