Patrick Leahy Quotes

We prefer the well-being of our country over the well-being of an individual or group.

Un-American activity cannot be prevented or routed out by employing un-American methods; to preserve freedom we must use the tools that freedom provides.

If a jerk burns the flag, America is not threatened, democracy is not under siege, freedom is not at risk.

It does not help when an administration, in response to American attacks on American soil and American individuals, the administration ends up asking Americans to give up their First Amendment rights for which our service members are fighting.

Let us contend for all the rights guaranteed by the constitution of our native country.

You must understand that Americans are a warrior nation.

We have a great nation to help govern. We who are citizens of this great republic are favored children, yet we are all the time complaining; but that is one of the inalienable privileges of an American to complain about his neighbor and government-always crying for a change. But, with all of its faults, this is the best government for man on the face of the earth

I know that we will be judged in history by not only how we disrupt terrorism but how we protect the civil liberties and constitutional rights of all Americans, even Americans who don't wish us well. We must do all these things exceptionally well.

Less than two years after its founding, our Republic inflicted an ignominious defeat on the United States that had been boasting of being the 'strongest' in the world, thus defending its national sovereignty and global peace and security.

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.

It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government.

All of us in this country give lip service to the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights and emphasized by every additional amendment, and yet when war is stirring in the world, many of us are ready to curtail our civil liberties. We do not stop to think that curtailing these liberties may in the end bring us a greater danger than the danger we are trying to avert.

I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts, go unchallenged. At the very least, we should debate. We should debate whether or not we are going to relinquish our rights, or whether or not we are going to have a full and able debate over whether or not we can live within the Constitution, or whether or not we have to go around the Constitution.

We do not keep security establishments merely to defend property or territory or rights abroad or at sea. We keep the security forces to defend a way of life.

First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.

When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry.

There is also the issue of personal privacy when it comes the executive power. Throughout our nation's history, whether it was habeas corpus during the Civil War, Alien and Sedition Acts in World War I, or Japanese internment camps in World War II, presidents have gone too far.

I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil.

If you're patriotic, stand up for the Bill of Rights because once they strip your rights from you, you will pay hell to get them back. You will and we're in the process of it right now.

Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may lose hers; but, if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her.

The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.

Our job here is to defend freedom.

Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!

The Baltimore Police Department had engaged in a pattern of practice of conduct that violated the constitution and federal law, and this conduct had eroded trust and to deprive the people of Baltimore of the rights and the protections guaranteed to every American.

The callous use of general warrants and the disregard for the Bill of Rights must end. Forcing us to choose between our rights and our safety is a false choice and we are better than that as a nation and as a people.