Rights aren't really rights if someone can take them away.

If one were to rob human beings of the power to do and say what they please, that would be to take away, and to curtail the first principle of independence.

Liberties aren't given, they are taken.

To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril.

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

When the man who feeds the world by toiling in the fields is himself deprived of the basic rights of feeding, sheltering, and caring for his own family, the whole community of man is sick.

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.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Freedom is a very dangerous thing. We ration it very closely.

In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt.

grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

You can't have occupation and human rights.