In 1790, John Philpot Curran said in his Speech on the Right of Election, "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."

More famously reformulated in 1852, the abolitionist, orator, and Liberator columnist Wendell Phillips told the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."