Civil Freedom Quotes

It has been the wise policy of these states to extend the protection of their laws to all those who should settle among them of whatever nation or religion they might be and to admit them to a participation of the benefits of civil and religious freedom, and... the benevolence of this practice as well as its salutary effects has rendered it worthy of being continued in future times.

If to preserve political independence and civil freedom to nations was a just ground of war, a war to preserve national independence, property, liberty, life, and honor from certain universal havoc is a war just, necessary, manly, pious; and we are bound to persevere in it by every principle, divine and human, as long as the system which menaces them all, and all equally, has an existence in the world.

Political freedom is, or ought to be, the best guaranty for the safety and continuance of spiritual, mental, and civil freedom. It is the combination of numbers to secure the liberty to each one.

Your creation of this Committee is, in my opinion, the greatest venture in the protection of civil liberty officially undertaken by the government since reconstruction.

To the kindly influence of Christianity we owe that degree of civil freedom, and political and social happiness which mankind now enjoys.... Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all blessings which flow from them, must fall with them.

This is the first step on the odious ground of conscription—a plan sir, which never will and never ought to be submitted to by this country while it retains one idea of civil freedom.

The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities…. This nation … will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Our Constitution is color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race ... is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with civil freedom.

The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom. That's a personal evaluation, of course.

Here, also, has been evolved the form of government consistent with the largest possible civil liberty.

The commerce of a free people is many times more valuable than that of slaves. Freemen produce and consume vastly more than slaves. They have therefore more to buy and more to sell. Hence the free states have a direct pecuniary interest in the civil freedom of all the other states. Commerce between free and slave states is not reciprocal or equal.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.