Hanan Ashrawi Quotes

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny.

I grew up as a discriminated minority in a dictatorship, so obviously the issue of human rights is a matter of concern for me.

We must ask the high cadres ... When you suppressed the rights of others to express freely their political views, did you secure your own?

Freedom for the government is enslavement for the people. When the government is free the people are enslaved. When the government is contained then the people are free.

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

A functioning police state needs no police.

I'm tired of living in a police state.

Every kind and degree of evil of which mankind are susceptible may be inflicted on them by their government.

Perhaps at no time in our history had there been such a wholesale violation of civil liberties.

When the tyranny of the state is combined with the hypocrisy of the church, you have a modern example of the twin vultures that have devoured man, and his rights, throughout the ages.

It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.

Security is no replacement for liberty.

These enemies of society were to be driven out of New York regardless of their constitutional rights.

The people are frightened. When they are frightened, they are much more willing to give us their liberties. But giving up their liberties won't make them safer, that's the real sad part of it.

If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it's no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.

When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people … the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

If the Chinese government gets carried away with denying basic rights, then there will be a pushback from within.

California always struck me as a police state.

Ultimately freedom is necessary for a society, because every despotic society - for instance, the Russian society - lives on the basis of a rather implausible dogma - the Marxist dogma of world redemption through Communism.

Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.

Liberty... is there only when there is no abuse of power.

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?

We expect them [Salvadoran officials] to work toward the elimination of human rights.

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.