Quotes About Liberties

I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don't contract them.

It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda. We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.

The liberties and freedoms which we hold dear and we recognize and cherish and respect guide the way we gather information in the United States.

During the debates for mayor, I was continually pressed on my position on the policing procedure known as 'stop and frisk' - which is actually in law enforcement known as 'stop, question and frisk' - and why I believed that, if used properly, it could reduce crime without infringing on personal liberties and human rights.

If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.

Most liberals think of civil liberties as their Achilles heel. It isn't.

In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people. James Madison, U.S. President

Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution.

It was "the duty of every subject, for conscience's sake, to submit to his authority, while he acts according to the law." Should he imperil the natural right and liberties of his subjects, however, "he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience.

The right-minded were those who insisted on colonial liberties. Treason, he held, consisted of the failure to defend those liberties.

History has no more unlikely heroes than the Israelites of Moses' day. Capricious, fractious, wayward, hardly able to see tomorrow, let alone the unfolding drama of the centuries, they became, in Herman Melville's evocative phrase, the bearers of "the ark of the liberties of the world.

And it especially cannot endure when powerful groups in that society seek at every turn to undermine and destroy its very being. The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable.

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that those liberties are the gift of God? That they are violated but with his wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep for ever. If

Whenever a religious movement has gained the reins of governmental power, individual liberties are strangled.

Article III The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretense whatever.

In the old Republican days the subject of slavery and of the saving of the Union made appeals to the consciences and liberty-loving instincts of the people. These later years have been full of talk about commerce and dinner pails, but I feel sure that the American conscience and the American love of liberty have not been smothered. They will break through this crust of sordidness and realize that those only keep their liberties who accord liberty to others.

If we expose the Chinese to our freedoms, it may create a greater hunger for democracy, reform and liberties in China.

I like to say 'Reign' is the '24' of the pre-Renaissance. I think we're going to take a lot of liberties with history, as well as extend it over a longer period of time.

If the concern is security, there needs to be evidence-backed policies to increase security and safety, while maintaining our liberties and freedoms. Policies that clamp down on freedoms and don't increase security empirically need to be outright rejected.

It's so interesting that when I finished 'The X-Files' in 2002, the - call it the political and cultural climate in America - was one of fear, and trust of government. Because we put ourselves in the hands of the authority who was going to protect us. And, you know, we gave up a lot of our liberties to Homeland Security, etc.

Finally, the physical damage Osama and friends can do us—terrible as it has been thus far—is as nothing as to what he is doing to our liberties. Once alienated, an "unalienable right" is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated.

Your dispatch is received, and if genuine, which its extraordinary character leads me to doubt, I have to say in reply that I regard the levy of troops made by the administration for the purpose of subjugating the states of the South, as in violation of the Constitution, and as a gross usurpation of power. I can be no party to this wicked violation of the laws of the country, and to this war upon the liberties of a free people. You can get no troops from North Carolina.

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.

At heart, American conservatives like myself are believers in the Constitution. We believe that the principles embodied in the Constitution are enduring, and that to whatever extent we deviate from them we put our liberties at risk. Our views are consistent because we believe in absolute truths and the essential soundness, even righteousness, of the Founder's vision of government.