Ashraf Ghani Quotes

Security without freedom means slavery.

Our constitutional liberties shall not be sacrificed in our search for greater security, for that is what our enemies and all enemies of freedom and democracy hope to achieve.

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.

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.

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

There is no security in the profered system, either for the rights of conscience or the liberty of the Press.

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.

Liberty comes only after security.

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.

[Marco] Rubio says we should collect all Americans' records all of the time. The Constitution says otherwise. I think they're both wrong. I think we defeat terrorism by showing them that we do not fear them.

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

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused.

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.

As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.

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

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

We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.

It gives me pleasure to find that public liberty is effectually secured in each and all the policies of the United States, though somewhat differently modeled.

There is growing use of government intrusion into your creative space…. The government is able to see more deeply into our intellectual lives.

There is no past invasion of our liberties which by its nature could not happen again. Without our constant vigilance, everything that has happened before will happen again.

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.

I do not intend to take a position, which, if maintained, would abridge the freedom of discussion or restrain the liberty of the press. But I do contend that every principle of political justice, nay, every principle of humanity, demands that discussions shall not be persisted in, when it is manifest that their inevitable consequence is to render insecure … lives and property

Civil liberty and … martial law cannot endure together; the antagonism is irreconcilable; and, in the conflict, one or the other must perish.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

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).