John McDonnell Quotes

There is nothing more foreign to a civilised and democratic system than preventive detention.

It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad

Law and freedom must be indivisible partners. For without law, there can be no freedom, only choas and disorder; and without freedom, law is but a cynical veneer for injustice and oppression.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.

If it is not totalitarian to arrest a man and detain him, when you cannot charge him with any offence against any written law --- if that is not what we have always cried out against in Fascist states -- then what is it?

It is ingrained into our national life that the rule of law makes us free.

As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing.

A country that goes out of its way to imprison the innocent has no business preaching democracy to the world.

The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches.

Detention without trial is history in Malaysia.

The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.

Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.

I feel that at any of our rights can be taken away at any moment.

… [Secret detention is] odious to a democratic society

Perhaps at no time in our history had there been such a wholesale violation of civil liberties.

Liberty dies in the hearts of men and women: when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.

There is only one rule of law in our country, which provides rights and security for every citizen.

We desire and thirst for freedom, democracy and the rule of law just like anyone else. And we are prepared to fight tooth and nail for all of those things.

Democracy is better than tyranny.

Human rights and rule of law are inseparably connected.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

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.

America is today the hope of all honorable men who respect the rights of their fellow men and who believe in the principle of freedom and justice.

My Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation.

Liberty cannot live apart from constitutional