"Governmental techniques, which amalgamate organizational, psychological, and police techniques, tend to lend to government absolute powers.  And here I must emphasize a great law which I believe to be essential to the comprehension of the world in which we live, viz., that when power becomes absolute, values disappear.  Power eliminates, in proportion to its growth, the boundary between good and evil, just and unjust." - French philosopher and law professor Jacques Ellul, The Technological Order

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

"As for those in power, they are so anxious to preserve the myth of infallibility, that they will do their utmost to ignore the truth" - Boris Pasternak

"Those in power want only to perpetuate it" - Justice William O. Douglas

"Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it.  It is the same old story." - Lincoln Steffens