Barack Obama Quotes

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

Government money only pays for the "liberties" the government thinks you should have, and therefore it can determine how you exercise them. That turns liberties into privileges dispensed at the whim of the state.

If government can give you rights, government can take them away from you.

For two decades the state has been taking liberties, and these liberties were once ours.

The legitimate acts of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.

The real needs of the people ought never give way to the imaginary wants of the state.

The Constitution is not about restricting the people; it is about restricting the government.

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

There are some issues that are not in control of the government. Two of those issues are human rights and personal freedoms are in the domain of Iran's conservative judicial system.

The object of a Constitution is to restrain the Government, as that of laws is to restrain individuals.

The function of State coercion is to override individual coercion, and, of course, coercion exercised by any association of individuals within the State. It is by this means that it maintains liberty of expression, security of person and property, genuine freedom of contract, the rights of public meeting and association, and finally its own power to carry out common objects undefeated by the recalcitrance of individual members.

All... natural rights may be abridged or modified in [their] exercise by law.

Every time you pass a law, it is a little bite out of freedom.

Government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.

I think if you open the door to government control of television, then you let in a host of questions about rights.

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

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.

But look what happens when the government gives you rights. When the government gives you rights, unlike when God gives you rights, the government can take them away. When government gives you rights, the government can tell you how to exercise those rights.

Prohibition is a deathblow to the liberty of the individual …

Every law is an evil for every law is an infraction of liberty.

There exists in modem America the necessity for protecting all of us from arbitrary action by governments more powerful and more pervasive than any in our ancestors’ time.

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

Civil liberty is the power of a civil society or state to govern itself by its own discretion or by laws of its own making, without being subject to the impositions of any power in appointing and directing which the collective body of the people have no concern and over which they have no control

Citizenship is basic to all other claims which individuals make on the state, or the state makes upon them.