"The history of the earth! Doth it present anything but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other?"

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer [prompted by American slavery].

"Dissidents understood the power of freedom because it had already transformed our own lives. It liberated us the day we stopped living in a world where ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ were, like everything else, the property of the State. And for the most part, this liberation did not stop when we were sentenced to prison."

Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy

“Some of this history is very interesting, but the motive behind it is not historical. It was Columbus, and not his chambermaid, who sailed to discover America; Napoleon, and not his math teacher, who crushed Europe under his heel.”

William Gairdner, The Trouble with Democracy

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."

John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (quoted on https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/679-war-is-an-ugly-thing-but-not-the-ugliest-of) 

"I allow that, if no Supreme Ruler exists, wise to form and potent to enforce the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that hypothesis let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer.”

Edmund Burke An Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs