Wasn't he paraphrasing Cicero?
"By the time the convention opened, I had been branded as a fascist, a racist, a trigger-happy warmonger, a nuclear madman and the candidate who couldn't win," Mr. Goldwater recalled.
That convention, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, was long remembered for the spectacle of Goldwater partisans drowning out Rockefeller with a chorus of boos and hoots when he addressed the delegates from the platform. It was also remembered for Mr. Goldwater's own acceptance speech, in which he declared that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Mr. Goldwater would later explain that the phrase was borrowed from the Roman statesman Cicero, who used it in one of his orations against his archenemy, the patrician Cataline. But like his comment on defoliation in Vietnam, it caused an immediate uproar, and Mr. Goldwater had to explain himself.
In a letter to Richard Nixon, who asked Mr. Goldwater for a clarification, he said that what he meant was that "wholehearted devotion to liberty is unassailable and that halfhearted devotion to justice is indefensible."
Cheers,
Scott.