“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

The saying “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” is often used in commentary about the need to continually guard against efforts by the government or political pressure groups to restrict freedom.

It’s sometimes used by people who are political conservatives, sometimes by liberals. Those who use it frequently claim it’s a quote by American Founding Father and President Thomas Jefferson.

It’s not.

As noted by Jefferson scholars there is no evidence that he ever said or wrote “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” or any of its variants.

The quote is also often attributed to the Irish lawyer and politician John Philpot Curran. That’s closer to the truth. However, what he actually said was not as succinct as the famous saying.

In a speech he gave in Dublin on July 10, 1790, Curran said:

“The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”

Traditionally, the most famous use of “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” included in books of quotations is from a speech made by the American Abolitionist and liberal activist Wendell Phillips on January 28, 1852.

Speaking to members of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society that day, Phillips said:

“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 today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.”

Because of that speech, Phillips is sometimes credited with coining the famed aphorism. However, Anna Berkes, a research librarian at The Jefferson Library, has discovered uses that predate Phillips’ speech.

In a post on the Jefferson Library blog, Berkes wrote:

“Not to be mean to Mr. Wendell Phillips, but he’s about to get slightly less famous. After two days of ridiculously feverish searching, I’ve traced the purported Phillips version of this quote all the way back to 1809.  (For the record, Mr. Phillips was 2 years old at that time.)”

Berkes noted that, in a biography of Major General James Jackson published in 1809, author Thomas Charlton used the same words, just in a different order.

Charlton wrote that one of the obligations of biographers of famous people is “fastening upon the minds of the American people the belief, that ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’”

Berkes also found several news articles that include the more familiar version of the line as later used by Phillips.

For example, an article in the May 2, 1833 edition of The Virginia Free Press and Farmers’ Repository says:

“Some one has justly remarked, that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’ Let the sentinels on the watch-tower sleep not, and slumber not.”

One of the news articles she found, in the January 4, 1838 edition of the Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, uses the same quote and attributes it to Thomas Jefferson — one of the earliest sources to do so. (Wrongly.)

Like any famous saying, there are many variations of the eternal vigilance saying

My personal favorite is by the novelist Aldous Huxley. In his spoken introduction to the 1956 CBS Radio Workshop adaptation of his novel Brave New World, Huxley said:

“The price of liberty, and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.”

Click this link or the image above to listen to the CBS Radio adaptation on the Internet Archive.

Postscript: As I write this updated version of my post about the eternal vigilance saying in late January 2026, I can’t help but think of the recent tragic events in Minneapolis. Last year, long before two American citizens were there were shot and killed by agents of the American government, it also came to the mind of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. He is one of the many state AGs who have filed lawsuits challenging the legality of the Trump Administration’s approach to enforcing immigration laws and repeated attempts to defy court orders. Ellison said in an interview that he is often asked what happens if Trump continues to ignore court orders? He said, “The answer is: The American people are the people who guarantee American democracy, and the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

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