E. P. Thompson Quotes

As government grows, freedom recedes.

The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned - the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach - is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

The bottom line is that we cannot sit idle as unparalleled rules and regulations significantly restrict our rights and ability to care for our families.

I have noticed, with much distress, the excessive wartime activity of the investigating bureaus of Congress and the administration, with their impertinent and indecent searching out of the private lives and the past political beliefs of individuals.

What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.

With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.

I am not about to be a party to anything having to do with the law that is going to destroy individual freedom and liberty in this country.

When a government forcibly holds enough people indefinitely without trial, it evokes the kinds of raids, detention, and abuses of power associated with authoritarian states - or darker periods in American history.

Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.

[J]ust because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right.

The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that.

I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.

Individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state.

I do think that our freedoms are at risk.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

Why, in our 'free' country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?

Libertarians regard the state as the Supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. All states everywhere, whether democratic, dictatorial, or monarchical, whether red, white, blue or brown.

Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.

My office has been one of the most scrupulous in the country with regard to the protection of individual rights. I've been on record for years in law journals and books as championing the rights of the individual against the oppressive power of the state.

The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has used that tragic event as a justification to rip up our constitution and our civil liberties. And I honestly believe that one or two 9/11s, and martial law will be declared in our country and we're inching towards a police state.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

Whenever regulation increases, personal freedom decreases.

Is there anything in the existing condition that makes the duty of Congress to put the liberty of all the people of the United States in jeopardy?... Are we going to take up the question of what a man shall eat and what a man shall drink, and put him under severe penalties if he is eating or drinking something different from what the chemists of the Agricultural Department think desirable?