Freedom requires self restraint

John Adams, sounding positively Burkean, on the relationship between liberty, the American Constitution, and the necessary condition for both:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge...would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

Via Alan Snyder at Big Government