Rand Paul Quotes

The question is not whether granting the government [this] authority makes us incrementally safer, but whether the additional safety is worth the sacrifice in terms of individual privacy, personal liberty and public trust.

The domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition. The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism. Accepting that bargain enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom - "he who does not move does not notice his chains," observed Rosa Luxemburg - but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.

I would have never signed the Patriot Act. I would have never signed the National Defense Authorization Act allowing for arrests and detainment of you and me as U.S. citizens without being charged.

This has been the new normal since September 11. Everyone knows, but nobody says, that if something happens again, the elite consensus in this country, and the overwhelming consensus of the citizenry, will be to pitch the Bill of Rights out the window and start rounding folks up.

Do we fear terrorism so much that we throw out our Constitution, and are we unwilling and afraid to debate our Constitution?

There’s always this struggle in a war between liberty and security … during war time we have these excesses and afterwards we apologize.

The Patriot Act is the most egregious piece of legislation to ever leave Congress since the Alien and Sedition Acts. John Ashcroft and every member of Congress who voted for it should be indicted.

The most terrifying possibility since 9/11 has not been terrorism — as frightening as that is — but the prospect that Americans will give up their rights in pursuing the chimera of security.

Homeland security intelligence done the wrong way will give us thought police.

Since the first Patriot Act, as this has evolved, more and more of the privacy of Americans is disappearing. And that’s going to hurt us; it’s not going to make us safer.

I do think that when you go into red states, they're - so-called red states - I think they're troubled with certain excesses with respect to the Patriot Act, but they're also concerned with making sure we're secure against terrorism.

I will not let the patriot act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.

I believe strongly that we can protect our people without undermining our constitutional rights and I worry very, very much about the huge attacks on privacy that we have seen in recent years - both from the government and the private sector. I worry that we are moving toward an Orwellian society, and this is something I will oppose as vigorously as I can.

The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.

The new laws passed by Congress in the name of fighting terrorism pose a greater danger to the civil liberties of American citizens than to the operations of terrorists. Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die.

I suppose the Green Party doesn't care for the anti-civil libertarian provisions of the notoriously named Patriot Act, invading privacy, and being able to search your home, and not tell you for 72 hours.

The Patriot Act is ludicrous. Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S. infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone's communications.

Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.

This thing called Patriot Act, through which we abdicated a lot of our civil rights to defend the country against terrorism, it's a four-year story.

That's not how national security works... I don't care what the Supreme Court said 30 years ago or what some judge said 15 minutes ago. This is America, and our government is collecting way too damn much data on we the private citizens!

I will not counter the insanity of the PATRIOT Act with an overblown fear of my rights being taken away.

Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy.

In a country where Americans sense, quite genuinely, that their freedoms have been taken away by the government - as in the U.S. Patriot Act, as in NSA surveillance - people feel powerless.

I call it the 'House of Reprehensibles.' We don't have any real political resistance to this growth of the domestic state across the board. So I'm much more focused on that than on the Patriot Act, which is a real effort, however inept, to deal with a real problem.

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