Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail."

~ John C. Calhoun  

"The constitution which at any time exists,
till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people,
is sacredly obligatory upon all."

~ Rhode Island Declaration of Rights Article I, Section I  

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule,
where fifty-one percent of the people may
take away the rights of the other forty-nine."

~ Thomas Jefferson (Questionable)  

"Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like."

~ Alan Dershowitz  

"I cannot assent to the view, if it be meant that the legislature may impair or abridge the rights of a free press and of free speech whenever it thinks that the public welfare requires that it be done. The public welfare cannot override constitutional privilege."

~ John Marshall Harlan  

"Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work."

~ John Milton  

"The right to comment freely and criticize the action, opinions, and
judgment of courts is of primary importance to the public generally.
Not only is it good for the public; but it has a salutary effect
on courts and judges as well."

~ James P. Hughes  

"The Constitution is what the judges say it is."

~ Justice Charles Evans Hughes  

"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."

~ Justice William J. Brennan  

"The Supreme Court is steadily eroding the protections against police
excess promised by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth
Amendments to the Constitution."

~ Dan Baum  

"Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them."

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower  

~ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  

"The requirement of 'due process'
is not a fairweather or timid assurance.
It must be respected in periods
of calm and in times of trouble;
it protects aliens as well as citizens."

~ Felix Frankfurter  

"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  

"A court which yields to the popular will thereby license itself to practice despotism,
for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will."

~ Felix Frankfurter