Ronald Reagan Quotes

This system of military conscription … is not only inconsistent with the provisions and spirit of the Constitution, but also with all the principles of civil liberty.

I have a personal belief that you never have to give up liberty for security. You can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights.

I believe in limited government and the right of the individual to make choices and in a strong national defense and in freedom and liberty as being the right of every person on the face of the Earth.

A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.

I regard the principle of conscription … as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.... I cannot consistently, with self respect, do other than I have, namely, to deliberately violate an act which seems to me to be a denial of everything which ideally and in practice I hold sacred.

Read about some squirrelly guy who claims that he just don't believe in fighting, and I wonder how long the rest of us can count on being free.

I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!

Throughout the nation's history, the national destiny of the United States has been understood in antimilitaristic, libertarian terms.

Liberty comes only after security.

Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.

America stands strongest in challenging terrorism when we do not give up an inch of our civil liberties.

I believe that my theory is correct; for whatever be the question upon which I am arguing, whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or economical; whether it affects well-being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, property, labor, exchange, capital, wages, taxes, population, credit, or Government; at whatever point of the scientific horizon I start from, I invariably come to the same thing—the solution of the social problem is in liberty.

I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty.

Freedom cannot be trifled with. You cannot surrender it for security unless in a state of war, and then you must guard carefully the methods of so doing.

[A new all-encompassing national identification system] contradicts some of our most sacrosanct American principles of personal liberty and expectations of privacy and is far in excess of what is needed to provide us with the security and protections we all want.

Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear.

That's the key - to maintain the garden of liberty, right? This is a generational thing that we must all do continuously. We only have the rights that we protect. It doesn't matter what we say or think we have. It's not enough to believe in something; it matters what we actually defend.

Carelessness about our security is dangerous, carelessness about our freedom is also dangerous.

Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty.

Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.

I believe only a free society can ever be truly secure. The goal should be to make terrorists feel threatened, not the American people.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.

There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.

The government will ... go on in the highly democratic method of conscripting American manhood for European slaughter.

I am absolutely convinced, you never have to give up any of your freedoms in order to be secure.