Famous Civil Liberties Quotes

In 1977 Justice William Brennan wrote a famous article, published in the Harvard Law Review, that encouraged the use of state constitutions to protect constitutional rights.52 State constitutions, he argued, “are a font of individual liberties.

Patrick Henry said ‘give me liberty or give me death.’ I think his famous quote makes it crystal clear that the Constitutional framework of this country values liberty as an essential element of life, worth dying for. If something is worth such a sacrifice, how can the loss of it be justified for the argument that it will make us safer to give up our liberty and our civil rights? Are we to tell the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers of all the soldiers lost in foreign wars that it was all a big lie? That they died for nothing?

For realists, the state is the main actor and sovereignty is its distinguishing trait. The meaning of the sovereign state is inextricably bound up with the use of force. In terms of its internal dimension, to illustrate this relationship between violence and the state we need to look no further than Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(M. J. Smith 1986: 23).3 Within this territorial space, sovereignty means that the state has supreme authority to make and enforce laws. This is the basis of the unwritten contract between individuals and the state. According to Hobbes, for example, we trade our liberty in return for a guarantee of security. Once security has been established, civil society can begin. But in the absence of security, there can be no art, no culture, no society. The first move, then, for the realist is to organize power domestically. Only after power has been organized, can community begin.

On September 11th 2001, bin Laden, al Qaeda, and his co-conspirators attacked the United States. During these attacks, suicide bombers struck the famous Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly three thousand people on American soil.1 It was hailed as a second Pearl Harbor, except the kamikaze pilots came at the start of the war rather than the end. America would react much like it did after Pearl Harbor. War hysteria reared its ugly head as freedom vanilla replaced French vanilla in cafeterias in the style of Wilsonesque-nomenclature propaganda.2 Civil rights and natural rights would be openly assaulted by a government sworn to protect them in one of the longest wars in American history. Randolph Bourne’s decried jingoism would return to the sounds of trumpets blaring and the sight of flags waving. The familiar phrase “Remember the Lusitania,” which became “Remember Pearl Harbor,” became “Remember 9/11.” Anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment filled the country as America waxed hysterical, crying for “us” to “get those towelheads.

On March 15, Washington addressed the officers, determined to squash a reported scheme to march on Congress. For the first time, he confronted a hostile audience of his own men. Washington sternly rebuked talk of rebellion, saying it would threaten the liberties for which they had fought. An insurrection would only "open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood." He then staged the most famous coup de théâtre of his career. He was about to read aloud a letter from a congressman when the words swam before his eyes. So he fished in his pockets for his glasses. "Gentlemen," he said, "you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country." The mutinous soldiers, inexpressibly moved, were shamed by their opposition to Washington and restored to their senses. Washington agreed to lobby Congress on their behalf, and a committee chaired by Hamilton granted the officers a pension payment equivalent to five years' full pay.

For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga- a belief that we're all connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me- even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer- even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief- I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper- that makes this country work.

The two Trudeaus share not only a famous surname. There is an essential Pierre characteristic that I have noticed emerging in Justin, as I have watched him blossom into manhood. No matter what he did, in office or out, Pierre never failed to exercise his ultimate civil liberty: the right to be himself. Justin is cast in precisely the identical mould. As heir to that magnificent tradition, he will try to repeat history and reach for the top. Anything can happen—just watch him. 

spoke a few words of encouragement to them, exhorting them to remember that they were fighting in a just cause to preserve the integrity of the United States Government, which had never committed an act of tyranny toward any of its citizens; that they were fighting the battle of liberty, justice, and even for the rights, of humanity itself, not only for those under our own government but for the poor oppressed of all nations; that the tyrannical and oppressive governments of Europe were aiding and abetting in every way possible the misguided people of the South in their revolt against the best of governments; that England, who largely fomented the Rebellion by her emissaries in this country, hypocritically crying out against the barbarity of slavery, was now aiding, by her cursed, ill-gotten gold, the Southern people to maintain in perpetual slavery 4,000,000 human beings. All this in order to divide us and break up our glorious principle of self-government, wrested from her tyrannical hand by the brave heroes of the Revolution, who won for us our inheritance of liberty.

The U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that ‘taxes are what we pay for civilized society’. But John, Henry III, and Charles I were not buying a civilised society. John and Henry III were trying to buy back an empire, and Charles I was playing geopolitics.

A.K. Warder, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, University of Toronto, who has no interest in whitewashing either side of the conflict, writes: ‘The Turkish conquests of more than half India between 900 and 1300 were perhaps the most destructive in human history. As Muslims, the conquerors aimed not only to destroy all other religions but also abolish secular culture.’2 Will Durant, the well-known chronicler of civilisations, is as categorical: ‘The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history … its evident moral is that civilization is a precious thing whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians.’3 The degree of physical destruction is vouched for by noted art historian Heinrich Zimmer too, who laments that in north India ‘very little survives of the ancient edifices that were there prior to the Muslim conquest: only a few mutilated religious sites remain.’4 Amartya Sen concedes that ‘the slash and burn culture of the Muslim invaders … devastated several cities and ruined many temples, including particularly famous ones in Mathura, Kanauj, and (Somnath).’5 He also acknowledges the account of the Arab–Iranian traveller Alberuni who accompanied Mahmud to India, of this carnage. ‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed these wonderful exploits, by which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions.’6 However, he believes that the Hindutva movement is deliberately highlighting Muslim destruction ‘through motivated selection and purposefully designed emphases as well as frequent exaggeration’.7 He is in a hurry to move away from the barbarism of the Muslim invasion to the undeniable and welcome syncretic elements of Hindu–Muslim culture that developed much later and over time. It is possible that some politically affiliated sections of Hindu society are seeking to deliberately dwell on Muslim atrocities of the past in order to create religious divisions and exploit them for their own benefit. Such an approach is wrong and needs to be countered. However, it is equally wrong to gloss over history and falsify it for present-day ‘secular’ imperatives.

raised to mark German unity. From Schöneberg in West Berlin, the peal of the Freedom Bell was broadcast in the square in front of the Reichstag. A replica of the famous Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, financed in large part by donations from Americans, this bell had hung in Schöneberg’s town hall since October 1950. To this day, it bears the inscription “That this world under God shall have a new birth of freedom,” echoing President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863, at the turning point in the American Civil War. The inscription had become reality for us, too. The GDR was history. There was only one German state now.