Quotes About Rights And Liberties

#1. What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty ... Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.

Elbridge Gerry

#2. I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country, and the least encroachment of those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil.

Benjamin Franklin

#3. Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#4. In the area of national security, I urge the swift passage of an anti-terrorism law that will protect rather than subvert, enhance rather than weaken, the rights and liberties that terrorism precisely threatens with extinction.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

#5. As the elected representatives of the American people, all the people, nearly 300 million people, that we in the Senate are charged with the responsibility to examine whether to entrust their precious rights and liberties to [Supreme Court] nominee.

Patrick Leahy

#6. The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man will endeavor to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country.

George Washington

#7. After all, people seemed quite easy about having their rights and liberties taken away by those they looked up to, but somehow a space on the perch was a slap in the face, and treated as such.

Terry Pratchett

#8. The last stop to protect rights and liberties is the Supreme Court.

Dick Durbin

#9. Students of reading, writing and common arithmetick ... Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history ... should be rendered ... worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.

Thomas Jefferson

#10. You have to have wisdom and knowledge as well as virtue to preserve your rights and liberties.

David McCullough

#11. Declaration of Independence: that all of our rights and liberties come to us from our Creator.

Fulton J. Sheen

#12. We can give our intelligence and law enforcement community the powers they need to track down and take out terrorists without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties.

Barack Obama

#13. There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude.

Geoffrey Fisher

#14. Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man's rights and liberties.

Ayn Rand

#15. Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty?

Patrick Henry

#16. As we have seen from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's example, even one justice can profoundly alter the meaning of those words for our citizens. Even one justice can deeply affect the rights and liberties of the American people.

Edward Kennedy

#17. I think liberals have to come to terms with the market and embrace market mechanisms as the only way to run a society that produces widespread material well-being and respects individual rights and liberties.

Douglas Massey

#18. The Bill of Rights existed long before President Obama was elected, and as long as I'm a U.S. Senator, I will fight to protect the basic rights and liberties that belong to all of us as American citizens.

Rand Paul

#19. The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.

Hannah Arendt

#20. Judicial excellence means that a Supreme Court justice must have a sense of the values from which our core of our political- economic system goes. In other words, we should not approve any nominee whose extreme judicial philosophy would undermine rights and liberties relied upon by all Americans.

Herb Kohl

#21. The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill.

Ayn Rand

#22. After the Civil War, when blacks fought along whites to secure freedom for all, southern states enacted Black Codes, laws that restricted the civil rights and liberties of blacks. Central to the enforcement of these laws were the stiff penalties for blacks possessing firearms.

Niger Innis

#23. The Supreme Court is the last refuge in America for our rights and liberties.

Dick Durbin

#24. The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to 'create' rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.

William J. Brennan Jr.

#25. We [Israel] already have two very strong democratic tools - the two basic laws of personal liberties and human rights. I think we should also provide the judiciary with another tool so that they can rely on the fact that Israel is a Jewish state in verdicts.

Ayelet Shaked

#26. As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug.

Ludwig Von Mises

#27. It is still in the lap of the gods whether a society can succeed which is based on "civil liberties and human rights" conceived as I have tried to describe them; but of one thing at least we may be sure: the alternatives that have so far appeared have been immeasurably worse.

Learned Hand

#28. National security trumps a lot. It can trampke civil rights. It can denude personal liberties. But it cannot and never will triumph over political gamesmanship. - Kelly Paul

David Baldacci

#29. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction beyond that.

Joe Biden

#30. Laws are the very bulkwarks of liberty; they define every man's rights, and defend the individual liberties of all men.

J.G. Holland

#31. Legislators and judges are necessarily exposed to all the temptations of money, fame, and power, to induce them to disregard justice between parties, and sell the rights, and violate the liberties of the people. Jurors, on the other hand, are exposed to none of these temptations.

Lysander Spooner

#32. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.

Felix Frankfurter

#33. Civil liberties victories never stay won, but must be fought for over and over again.

Ira Glasser

#34. The Second Amendment is the one that really protects all of our liberties that we are given by our Lord, and our God-given rights, and are protected under the Constitution.

Paul Broun

#35. The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.

Terence McKenna

#36. Our mandate is to be a nation of laws. And the Supreme Court is the place where we look to safeguard our civil rights and our individual liberties.

Frank Lautenberg

#37. The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.

Thomas Jefferson

#38. Human rights and individual liberties, including religious freedom, will be at the heart of the new Iraq.

Jalal Talabani

#39. Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free-and we're not. Guess who's winning the war on terror?

Cory Doctorow

#40. I rise in support of a Canada in which liberties are safeguarded, rights are protected and the people of this land are treated as equals under the law.

Paul Martin

#41. There is so much each one of us can do to make a difference. We are at a dangerous juncture in the history of mankind ... We need to defend our principles and values, human rights, civil liberties and the rule of international law. If we don't our world will further descend into a state of chaos.

Bianca Jagger

#42. If you're patriotic, stand up for the Bill of Rights because once they strip your rights from you, you will pay hell to get them back. You will and we're in the process of it right now.

Jesse Ventura

#43. Our liberties do not come from charters; for these are only the declaration of pre-existing rights. They do not depend on parchments or seals; but come from the King of Kings and the Lord of all the earth.

John Dickinson

#44. Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.

Emmeline Pankhurst

#45. Having the right to choose determines whether women will find an equal place at life's table, whether children will be truly valued, and whether everyone's personal liberties, privacy, and bodily integrity will be safeguarded against the ideology of the right.

Gloria Feldt

#46. I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

Sara Sheridan

#47. Conscious of my own weakness, I can only seek fervently the guidance of the Ruler of the Universe, and, relying on His all-powerful aid, do my best to restore Union and peace to a suffering people, and to establish and guard their liberties and rights.

George B. McClellan

#48. IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE COULD LEARN WHAT I KNOW OF THE FIERCE HATRED OF THE PRIESTS OF ROME AGAINST OUR INSTITUTIONS, OUR SCHOOLS, OUR MOST SACRED RIGHTS, AND OUR SO DEARLY BOUGHT LIBERTIES, THEY WOULD DRIVE THEM OUT AS TRAITORS!

Abraham Lincoln

#49. By 1950, he had come to view the pedestrian as a threshold or indicator species capable of foretelling things to come - if the rights of the pedestrian were threatened, it would be an early indicator that broader freedoms of thought and action were also at risk.

Jonathan Eller

#50. The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

James McGreevey

#51. The legal system we have and the rule of law are far more responsible for our traditional liberties than any system of one man one vote. Any country or Government which wants to proceed towards tyranny starts to undermine legal rights and undermine the law.

Margaret Thatcher

#52. This is a time when the protections of Americans' liberties are directly at risk, as are the checks and balances that have served to constrain abuses of power for more than 200 years. The Supreme Court is relied upon by all of to us protect our fundamental rights.

Patrick Leahy

#53. We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization.

Paul Broun

#54. The Union next to our liberties the most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States, and distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union.

John C. Calhoun

#55. George W. Bush and his administration embarked on a full-scale assault on civil liberties, human rights and the rule of law, walking away from his international obligations, tearing up international treaties, protocols and UN conventions.

Bianca Jagger

#56. I'm a libertarian-conservative. I believe the state should focus on defending lives, rights, and property instead of depriving its citizens of their God-given liberties.

Todd Young

#57. We must support our rights or lose our character, and with it, perhaps, our liberties.

James Monroe

#58. When the public's right to know is threatened, and when the rights of free speech and free press are at risk, all of the other liberties we hold dear are endangered.

Christopher Dodd

#59. [I]f we care about our remaining liberties we must at some point draw a line in the sand and let politicians and bureaucrats know we will not tolerate further encroachment on our God-given rights to liberty.

Walter E. Williams

#60. Young people have this almost romantic attachment to civil rights, liberties, emancipating people from oppression, etc. The idea that such oppression exists in this country offends me, but it's able to be pushed and sold because education in this country is so woefully incompetent and inept.

Rush Limbaugh

#61. The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.

Potter Stewart

#62. The Obama Administration's obsession with forcing mandates on the American people has now reached a new low by violating the conscience rights and religious liberties of our people.

Marco Rubio