Rick Mercer Quotes

If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion.

I am convinced that a person is entitled to as much privacy as he wants. It should be his privilege to keep certain areas of his life out of the newspapers.

What people do in their private lives is their business, and shouldn't be anybody else's business.

My thing is personal freedoms: freedoms for the individual to love whom they want, do with what they want. In fact, I want the government out of almost everything.

You want your privacy as a human being.

No one has the responsibility to be out to anyone but himself or herself. I made my choice a million years ago.

The sanctity of a woman's right to control her own destiny is a moral force of its own... I came to realize that the question of choice is to be answered, not by the state, but by the individual.

Well I've already made it clear that it's a matter for individuals in exercising their own judgement, their own consciences to speak freely on matters of policy.

Not even my parents know how I vote.

… it [liberty] denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home, bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of one's own conscience and generally, to enjoy those privileges long recognized in common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

The people, the ultimate governors, must have absolute freedom of, and therefore privacy of, their individual opinions and beliefs regardless of how suspect or strange they may appear to others. Ancillary to that principle is the conclusion that an individual must also have absolute privacy over whatever information he may generate in the course of testing his opinions and beliefs.

our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas.

Nobody needs to justify why they "need" a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can't give away the rights of others because they're not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

I'm gay. I just didn't think it was anybody's business.

The free state offers what a police state denies - the privacy of the home, the dignity and peace of mind of the individual.

I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.

You want to make your own decisions, but you ought to make those decisions with an eternal perspective.

Abortion doesn't belong in the political arena. It's a private right, like many other rights concerning the family.

I feel very strongly in my opinion that everyone is responsible to themselves for what they do.

I don't know how to run your life. I don't know how to run your life. I don't have the authority to run your life. And the Constitution doesn't permit me to run your life.

I do not believe that the government should have its long nose poked into the private consensual relationships between people.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

Privacy is a function of liberty.

Privacy is implied. Privacy is not up for discussion.

This provision (the 4th Amendment) speaks for itself. Its plain object is to secure the perfect enjoyment of that great right of the common law, that a man's house shall be his own castle, privileged against all civil and military intrusion.