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“Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are rather forced upon them from without. … They do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. … All political rights and liberties which people enjoy today, they do not owe to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength. … Great mass movements and whole revolutions have been necessary to wrest them from the ruling classes, who would never have consented to them voluntarily.”

-- Rudolf Rocker, author of Pioneers of American Freedom, as cited here