Richard Perle Quotes

I have nothing to hide!

If we give up all our privacy rights, have we become any safer?

Privacy isn't negotiable. It's the right of every American.

I might have lived in England for the last several years, but I'm still an American citizen and I have not given up my right to privacy.

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.

If we take away all our privacy rights, we become our own terrorists.

A democratic country has zero tolerance for all illegal monitoring operations.

People don't object to spying on the grounds that the secret dossier about them might be full of errors. They object to spying because it's spying.

In a democracy there will always be a tension between security and privacy.

Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.

I particularly recognize that reasonable people can disagree as to what that proper balance or blend is between privacy and security and safety.

The right to personal privacy is precious. Without it, we are all potential victims for a prying secret police.

Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

No one in their right mind can say to me with a straight face that the Patriot Act has not aggregated the Fourth Amendment.

Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.

We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not - nor will we ever - monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people, including subjecting our activities to rigorous oversight from numerous internal and external sources.

I certainly respect privacy and privacy rights. But on the other hand, the first function of government is to guarantee the security of all the people.

Privacy, in my point of view, is a civil liberty that our Founding Fathers thought of a long time ago and concluded ... was an essential part of what it was to be an American.

The right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society and shall not be infringed without the showing of a compelling state interest.

We encounter the dilemma of freedom versus authority in all sorts of places but probably nowhere more frequently than in the area of Big Brother's ongoing efforts to protect us from ourselves – efforts that many people view as an invasion of their privacy or as infringement upon their God-given right to be stupid (though they don't usually put it that way).

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

Privacy is paradise.

How can we have our privacy? How can we have our independence now in these times with these cameras? Because I think privacy and our solitude is really important.

I think most people accept that it is necessary to have some surveillance in a democratic society. I think most people accept that it's important to have limits and clear safeguards on that.