Bill Clinton Quotes

Once we roared like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security! The solution for America's problem is not in terms of big government, but it is in big men over whom nobody stands in control but God.

By definition, the moment one crosses from center to left, one accepts more government control of people's lives. Therefore, the further left society moves, the more there is government control over its citizens' lives. It is astonishing that this obvious fact is not universally acknowledged and that the Left has somehow successfully portrayed itself as preoccupied with personal liberty.

When I think of civil liberties I think of the founding principles of the country. The freedoms that are in the First Amendment. But also the fundamental right to privacy.

The Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.

When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it.

When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.

The World's Smallest Political Quiz is responsible for many Americans' first contact with libertarian ideas. While traveling around the country, I have often heard people say, 'I never knew I was a libertarian until I took the Quiz!'

The more we come to rely on government, the fewer freedoms we will enjoy. Government will start dictating what we can own, eat and drive, how much of our money they will let us keep, how we run our businesses, how many - if any - guns we can own, and what we may and may not say. Oh, wait! They are already doing that. To preserve freedom we must fight for it.

It is without doubt that freedoms of the press and speech need to be protected, but there are undisputed limits to these freedoms, limits that often come into play when national security is threatened.

I would consider all of the legislation which I have supported meaningless if I were to sit idly by, silent, during a period which may go down in history as an era when we permitted the curtailment of our liberties.

Many Americans don't have an understanding of the freedoms they regularly enjoy.

I'm a libertarian-conservative. I believe the state should focus on defending lives, rights, and property instead of depriving its citizens of their God-given liberties.

No American conservative has ever argued that the government should never be involved in peoples' lives. That is anarchy, and we don't argue for that.

The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

I am a passionate civil libertarian.

Americans chose a limited government that exists to protect our rights, not to grant them.

The right to dissent is one of the great and cherished freedoms that we enjoy by reason of the excellent accident of our American births.

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.

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm—as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.

If conservatives really believed in individual liberty, as they endlessly claim — and if they used both halves of their brains — then they'd be libertarians. Instead, they sabotage themselves, and their cause, by constantly generating one spurious reason after another to deprive other people of their freedom.

When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly. That is, when we set up this country, abuse of people by Government was a big problem. So if you read the Constitution, it's rooted in the desire to limit the ability of — Government's ability to mess with you, because that was a huge problem. It can still be a huge problem. But it assumed that people would basically be raised in coherent families, in coherent communities, and they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare.

The beauty of our country is that when it was founded that they took some time to lay out civil liberties in the first 10 Amendments - the Bill of Rights. I'm a firm believer in those civil liberties and the ability to have your own opinion.

I'm okay with anybody expressing their rights.

I'm a believer in the Constitution and in the First Amendment. Not just for raising money but also for freedom of speech.

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.