Tom Denning Quotes

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

The Great Firewall of China and the unrestricted surveillance by the National Security Agency illustrate a tendency for the state to assert its interests at the expense of individuals.

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.

The safety of the state is the highest law.

The issue of wiretapping raises the issue of the balance between human liberty and the requirements of national security. I would say that the weight should be on the side of human liberty and that if human liberty is ever to be infringed, the demonstration on the national security side must be overwhelming.

It doesn’t keep us safe and it doesn’t keep us free if we give up our liberties to the government.

Benjamin Franklin once said, 'A people who would trade liberty for security deserve neither.' I think we can have both. We can keep our liberties. We can have our security.

It really is this: you are either for liberty, you're for freedom, and you're for living how you want to live without infringing and impugning on anyone else's rights, or you want the state to deal with everything.

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.

I strongly believe that we as a nation can be both secure and free.

How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We're supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

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

Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

The American people believe that we ought to control our government. On the other hand, we've seen government more and more controlling us

There has been much said about danger to the national security. Democracy itself is a dangerous form of government and in its very danger lies its strength. The protection of individual rights by the requirement of due process of law, which has long endured in this nation of ours, is a radical and dangerous idea in most of the world today.

The passion and will for freedom is always contradicted by the necessity of the state.

Be most on guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed.

How far are we to go in pursuit of greater security at the cost of essential liberties?

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

… while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.

We give up our liberties too casually [in emergencies and crises]

The individual is greater than the state.

Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad.