William J. Brennan Jr. Quotes

I don't know how to run your life. I don't know how to run your life. I don't have the authority to run your life. And the Constitution doesn't permit me to run your life.

Government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.

We cannot afford to walk down that dangerous path of government overstepping its boundaries into the most personal parts of our lives.

Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.

Prohibition is a deathblow to the liberty of the individual …

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

The liberal, emphasizing the civil and property rights of the individual, insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the state his servant.

It has been held, right up to the present day, that the freedom of individual must take second place to the security of the State.....

Individual liberty depends upon keeping government under control.

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

The state has no place in the nation's bedrooms.

The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned - the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach - is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.

Individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state.

Every time you pass a law, it is a little bite out of freedom.

I always received much more satisfaction as a defense attorney in obtaining an acquittal for a client than I ever have as a D.A. in obtaining a conviction. All my interests and sympathies tend to be on the side of the individual as opposed to the state.

Ultimately, I'm about liberty and I think you have to defend it.

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

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.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

We have never had a more qualified and capable champion of personal and economic freedom than the 2012 Libertarian Party candidate for President of the United States - Governor Gary Johnson.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

We don't want a busybody government - a boss - that butts into our lives every chance it gets to tell us how to work, how to play, where to live and on and on.

Just the concept of personal freedom within a democracy, for instance, is a relatively young idea - only about 300 years old in this country.

Whenever regulation increases, personal freedom decreases.