Nice sentence to put in context.

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
― Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 2

"Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance--and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former. In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned." By Benjamin Wittes

Memoirs of the life and writings of Benjamin Franklin (1818)