I have a vague memory of something like this in one of Heinlein's novels - probably a quote from Lazarus Long

"Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master."

-Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus)

Few men desire liberty because they think they already have it, and the only just master of a man is himself.

No clues on the quote, but replace 'overseer' by 'cash-flow', and who would disagree?

Sounds like something Lenin would have said, or Dzerzhinsky.

Maybe you think that's what Lenin believed. It's not really how he talked, though. How about:

"People’s freedom can be ensured only when the people can really, without let or hindrance, form their associations, hold meetings, publish newspapers, make their own laws and elect and replace all officials in the state who are entrusted with carrying out the laws and administering the country on the basis of the laws. Thus people’s freedom can be really and fully ensured only when all power in the state really and fully belongs to the people. This is absolutely obvious..."
http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/lenin/works/1906/may/05.htm

or

"Everywhere the standing army has become the weapon of reaction, the servant of capital in its struggle against labour, the executioner of the people’s liberty. Let us not, therefore, stop short at mere partial demands in our great liberating revolution. Let us tear the evil up by the roots. Let us do away with the standing army altogether. Let the army merge with the armed people, let the soldiers bring to the people their military knowledge, let the barracks disappear to be replaced by free military schools. No power on earth will dare to encroach upon free Russia, if the bulwark of her liberty is an armed people which has destroyed the military caste, which has made all soldiers citizens and all citizens capable of bearing arms, soldiers."
http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/lenin/works/1905/nov/15d.htm

Most people don't care about abstractions. Liberty is too conceptual to register. If misrule doesn't hurt, it's not their problem - and if it does, they'll take the path of least fuss to making the hurting stop. It's not that they want "an overseer". They want to get on with their lives and have nothing unexpected change. They only support statism because it's the status quo.

Sounds like Menken

Did anybody actually read the Lenin quotes?
Without irony?
Freedom is the state, and war is peace.
That's all they amount to.

The thing to note about the Lenin quotes is that they date from the era of Russia's liberal revolution, and before he'd consolidated power over the Bolsheviks, never mind come to power in Russia.

Well I don't think any one could read the Lenin knowing what happened without seeing irony.

Guy's right that the rhetorhic changed considerably after 1917. But then it was all along the lines of we need to make sacrifices now for future freedom. But he always claimed that freedom was the aspiration. So in 1917, arguing against the slogan of a "free state" Lenin wrote:

"So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm#s4

But I guess Pietr thinks that's transparent rubbish, too.

I'm not aware that Lenin ever said anything remotely like the quote cited in the post.

Sounds like the old and tedious Samizdata commenter, Euan Gray. One of life's traffic wardens. I miss him in a way since it was therapeutic to smash his arguments all over the place.

Pietr, I read them without irony. They remind me why I found him so appealing in my youth. Are quotes like this the source of the tiresome childish argument about communism never having been tried out properly, anywhere, due to corruption of the ideal by power-seekers ?

Sounds to me like something Thoreau or Emerson would have (but probably didn't) say.

That saying could not have been made by a Marxist, about whom one could say: "Never express in a pithy sentence what can be said in a paragraph of dialectic."

Or something like that.

I don't know the author, but my guess would be that it's not biting enough to be H.L. Mencken.

Orwell?

It sounds awfully like something from Alexis de Tocquevilles, and it certainly has the reek of French snobbery about it. Closest I've found online is in a "Memoir on Pauperism" where I quote:

Placed between a savage independence that they no longer desire, and a political and civil liberty that they do not yet understand, they are defenceless against violence and deceit, and seem prepared to submit to every kind of tyranny provided that they are allowed to live or rather vegetate in their fields.

As someone has already mentioned, it's from Sallust. His "Histories", an incomplete work. The original Latin is:

Namque pauci libertatem, pars magna iustos dominos volunt

Just to expand on the point above, the quote is one of the two at the start of Tom Holland's excellent 'Rubicon' (the other is diametrically opposed).

is this possibly where you heard it?

Thank-you to everyone who has made suggestions here or over at my blog. The prize (or bragging rights at least) go to Jordan.

Sallust it is.