Winston Churchill Quotes
We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.
Churchill, Winston. "The Sinews of Peace." Address at Westminster College. 5 Mar. 1946, Fulton, Missouri.
This was written during the George W. Bush Administration where the reaction to 9-11 was to curtail some civil rights and constitutional protections in favor of more national security. Bush was not the only President who eroded civil rights in a fear for National Security. FDR interned the Japanese Americans. Woodrow Wilson jailed pacifists who protested against the draft. John Adams passed the infamous Alien & Sedition Acts.
Note the use of the phrase “against the government.” One of the unique aspects of the American Constitution and The Bill of Rights is that the government is considered a potential and even probable infringer on the liberties of the people. It is almost as though the government was the potential enemy. Modern libertarians state this very explicitly and it is ever present in the views of both the right and left wings of American politics. Most centrists recoil at the thought that some citizens see the government as the enemy, but even in America there have been times where the government has infringed on the rights of citizens only to have the courts or future administrations and Congresses correct the error.
This is probably the first known use of the Bill of Rights phrase in the English language. For the earliest American use, see Edward Rutledge.
Jefferson and some of the other Founding Fathers saw the American experiment as having implications for the whole world. To Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence was not just for Americans but ideally for all mankind.
Mosley had been incarcerated without charges or trial under the “national emergency” of the Second World War. This prevented him from organizing his “Blackshirts.” When it was clear that Germany would lose the war, Oswald was released, but without the prospect of Fascism dominating continental Europe, there was little interest in Fascist movements in England.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, DL, FRS, RA was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, Churchill was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an economic liberal and imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, as leader from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924. Churchill was also well known for his military career and as a historian, painter and writer, and among his many awards was the Nobel Prize in Literature.
