Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty

Wendell Phillips in a speech to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, in Boston, January 28, 1852.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty–power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten. The living sap of to-day outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit du corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only be unintermitted Agitation can a people be kiept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.