Potter Stewart Quotes

For decades in America, there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are.

Despite being commonplace, too many people with mental health problems still face stigma, prejudice and discrimination.

In many parts of the world, chaining of people with mental illnesses is not uncommon, nor is seeing people walking around in clearly an unwell state, half naked, and no one takes any notice of them. It is tragic. There is a basic human right, which is not about just healthcare, but it is about the right to life with dignity, a right to citizenship.

An individual citizen cannot protect himself from the powers of large corporations or external governments. It is the responsibility of the government to protect its citizens.

The state's interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens' Bill of Rights.

Our Constitution... has not left the religion of its citizens under the power of its public functionaries, were it possible that any of these should consider a conquest over the conscience of men either attainable or applicable to any desirable purpose.

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.

Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.

Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.

A government that intended to protect the liberty of the people would not disarm them. A government planning the opposite most certainly and logically would disarm them. And so it has been in this century. Check out the history of Germany, the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and Cambodia.

Who does not see that . . . the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?

When you have mental illness you don't have a plaster or a cast or a crutch, that let everyone know that you have the illness, so people expect the same of you as from anyone else and when you are different they give you a hard time and they think you're being difficult or they think you're being a pain in the ass and they're horrible to you. You spend your life in Ireland trying to hide that you have a mental illness.

The constitution of a country should not violate the constitutions of its citizens.

Liberalism has become a moral vaccine that immunizes people against stigmatization.

Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

A civil right is the most powerful right anybody can have. And people who oppose them are bigots. So you categorize what you want as a civil right, you immediately establish your opponent as a bunch of bigot hayseeds making it easier to defeat them.

Because the state can no longer protect us from crime, it wants to take away from us the means of protecting ourselves. This is the logic of gun control.

We struggled against apartheid because we were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about. It is the same with homosexuality. The orientation is a given, not a matter of choice. It would be crazy for someone to choose to be gay, given the homophobia that is present.

This country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem, and a tyranny problem disguised as a security problem.

I am totally committed to maintaining the freedom and equality America has to provide to every citizen.

. . . we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

It's just so bizarre how in this world if you have asthma, you take asthma medication. If you have diabetes, you take diabetes medication. But as soon as you have to take medicine for your mind, it's such a stigma behind it.

If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters.