Top 1200 Civil Liberties Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

The greatest achievement of the civil-rights movement is that it has restored the dignity of indignation.

I do not support a civil war. I don't want to be policeman of the world. But we can't back off of this.

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.

This country is not going to progress if we can't have decent civil conversations and be respectful to one another.

Rule of law is the most important element in any civil society.

Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice - a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation's liberties.

I think that civil rights issues take a lot of time to develop.

Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.

The right to vote is one of our nation's most important civil rights.

Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding.

The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.

Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs, our policy against narcotics -- like any public policy -- comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

A civil servant is sometimes like a broken cannon - it won't work and you can't fire it.

As a civil society, our task is to pressure governments into democratic changes.

The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.

That in a civil war there is continuous fighting, based on grievences that are forever changing.

Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.

In college, I was so blessed to have relationships with those who did the civil rights movement.

I came home from Portugal convinced that nothing is so important as making known what the Mother of God asked in those apparitions of 1917 . . . The future of our civilization, our liberties, our very existence may depend upon the acceptance of her commands.

You cannot demand your rights, civil or otherwise, if you are unwilling to say what you are.

I cannot accept a divide between Malagasy people and a civil war.

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.

When you have war, whether it's a war against drugs, war against terrorism, war overseas, the mentality of the people change and they're more willing to sacrifice their liberties in order to be safe and secure.

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.

Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.

By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights.

When I talk to entrepreneurs today, I feel like the grandfather who was in the Civil War.

For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression.

For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.

The necessary and wise subordination of the military to civil power must be sustained.

In reality it's pretty obvious that all the citizens of Israel have total civil equality.

It is our responsibility to stand up for equality, fairness, and civil rights.

Civil rights in this country is unfinished business, and racism is alive and well.

Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves.

We must demand a more civil tone and tenor in our politics.

Change comes when people are willing to commit acts of peaceful civil disobedience.

I do believe that non-violent civil disobedience is a very important and useful tactic.

A civil guest Will no more talk all, than eat all the feast.

Or maybe it's time to broaden out some of the African civil wars?

If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn.

Be civil to all; serviceable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

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.

No, sometimes we just have to take liberties because the idea was so good. I wish we'd just gone with the idea that Patsy had been a man. It would have been fantastic.

Ideological talk and phrase mongering about political liberties should be disposed with; all that is just mere chatter and phrase mongering. We should get away from those phrases.

Marriage is sacred and protected and has nothing to do with violating our civil rights.

If we want any significant development, we must co-opt civil society.

War was forced upon mankind in his original civil and social condition.

If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.

Magna Carta and the Civil War were about the power to tax.

In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war.

Few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks.

A proud man never shows his pride so much as when he is civil.

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

You gain and lose different things in different mediums or different sectors of different mediums. There are liberties you get on tiny indie films in terms of not having to be designed toward a marketing demographic.

Decision making can sometimes seem like inner civil war.

During the 60's, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.