Milton Friedman Quotes

I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom.

I believe only a free society can ever be truly secure. The goal should be to make terrorists feel threatened, not the American people.

There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.

We can give our intelligence and law enforcement community the powers they need to track down and take out terrorists without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties.

It's the reason the United States fell into the Patriot Act - because they were reacting.

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.

In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.

Liberty comes only after security.

We cannot make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free.

I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment, and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. In the abstract, you can complain about 'Big Brother' and how this is a potential program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then, I think we've struck the right balance.

Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear.

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.

Compulsory vaccination is an outrage and a gross interference with the liberty of the people in a land of freedom.

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

I'm very grateful that Barack Obama as president very much put protection of privacy on the agenda today, due to the fact of Islamist terrorism all over the world.

I grew up with the concept of freedom of speech. So I'm too old, it's too late for me to adjust to the new world, the new world order.

We need to find a way forward to make sure that we can stop terrorists while protecting the privacy, and liberty, of innocent Americans.

We do have to balance this issue of privacy and security. Those who pretend that there's no balance that has to be struck and think we can take a 100-percent absolutist approach to protecting privacy don't recognize that governments are going to be under an enormous burden to prevent the kinds of terrorist acts that not only harm individuals, but also can distort our society and our politics in very dangerous ways.

Our law enforcement must have every tool necessary to find and disrupt terrorists at home and abroad. That's the task of the 21st century.

The socialized state is to justice, order, and freedom what the Marquis de Sade is to love.

It's never easy dealing with terrorists, but it must be done through a mixture of political, economic and administrative means.

We have to find ways in which, collectively, we agree there's some things that government needs to do to help protect us, that in this age of non-state actors who can amass great power, I want my government - and I think the German people should want their government - to be able to find out if a terrorist organization has access to a weapon of mass destruction that might go off in the middle of Berlin.

Some in Washington say that you have to trade your liberty for security.

You liberals are going to have to understand something: I'm not the one that wants to put limits on anybody. You people are.

How much liberty do with want to give up for a false sense of security?