Jerry Falwell Quotes

The ACLU is an organization with a long and distinguished history of fighting to protect freedom of speech. On the other hand, in recent years, it has carried its mandate to ever more eccentric and often highly destructive lengths. While is may have been perfectly honorable for Dukakis to belong to the ACLU, it was equally legitimate for Bush to attack him for it. And with what enormous relish he did the job!

Churchmen are quick to defend religious freedom; lawyers were never so universally aroused as by President Roosevelt's Court bill; newspapers are most alert to civil liberties when there is a hint of press censorship in the air. And educators become perturbed at every effort to curb academic freedom. But too seldom do all of these become militant when ostensibly the rights of only one group are threatened. They do not always react to the truism that when the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes.

Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny.

If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn.

I'm working on "Living the Bill of Rights," and it's about people - well, it starts with Brennan and Douglas as people who not only live the Bill of Rights, but try to shape the reason for that.

We see our liberties curtailed more and more and more.We see a tremendous attack on religious freedom.

In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

This is probably as bad a day as the court has had on social issues since Roe vs. Wade.

The Second Amendment is in the Constitution to help citizens protect themselves from people like Senator Dianne Feinstein who would come along, and if they could determine what words you can and cannot say, where and where you can't say them. The Constitution is there to protect you from mayors like Mike Doomberg who wants to tell you how big your beverage can be.

Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too.

Our Bill of Rights, the most precious part of our legal heritage, is under subtle and pervasive attacks... In the struggle between our world and Communism, the temptation to imitate totalitarian security methods must be resisted day by day... When the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes.

Our job here is to defend freedom.

The First Amendment provides the only kind of security system that can preserve a free government - one that leaves the way wide open for people to favor, discuss, advocate, or incite causes and doctrines however obnoxious and antagonistic such views may be to the rest of us.

Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.

It is crucial that civil liberties in this country be preserved, otherwise the terrorists will win the battle against American values without firing another shot.

The freedom to speak is meaningless without the corollary freedom to keep silent.

That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door.

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism, are all too frequently those who . . . ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism-the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest, the right of independent thought.

We have to remember that the United States has certain principles, certain values that bind us all together, that make us all American. And if we allow those values, those rights to be rescinded for one group of individuals, then we are essentially opening the door to having all of our rights, all of our privileges rescinded.

One of the most clearly marked trends for over twenty years has been the decline in civil liberties.

One of the worst consequences politically would be for the majority of Democrats to vote for someone who, in the near future, would overturn well-established precedents on clean air, clean water, privacy, equal opportunity and religious liberty.

You cannot take away freedom to protect it, you cannot destroy the free market to save it, and you cannot uphold freedom of speech by silencing those with whom you disagree. To take rights away to defend them or to spend your way out of debt defies common sense.

To the ACLU, the First Amendment speaks more directly to freedom from religion than it does to freedom of religion.

For the last couple of hundred years, there have been struggles about this. Even the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the constitution talk about personal rights.

The civil rights of none, shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.