Rand Paul Quotes

How far are we to go in pursuit of greater security at the cost of essential liberties?

The issue of wiretapping raises the issue of the balance between human liberty and the requirements of national security. I would say that the weight should be on the side of human liberty and that if human liberty is ever to be infringed, the demonstration on the national security side must be overwhelming.

Security is no replacement for liberty.

Benjamin Franklin once said, 'A people who would trade liberty for security deserve neither.' I think we can have both. We can keep our liberties. We can have our security.

We do need to think about how we have security - everyone has a right to that - but we also need to think about how we maintain civil rights and personal freedom.

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 the area of national security, I urge the swift passage of an anti-terrorism law that will protect rather than subvert, enhance rather than weaken, the rights and liberties that terrorism precisely threatens with extinction.

We believe that government in Britain is there to protect people from terrorism and from the worst criminality, but never at the expense of our civil liberties and the basic tenets of our legal system.

If the concern is security, there needs to be evidence-backed policies to increase security and safety, while maintaining our liberties and freedoms. Policies that clamp down on freedoms and don't increase security empirically need to be outright rejected.

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.

Liberty and security are often in direct confrontation and must be balanced in a way that protects us without destroying what is worth protecting.

The people of the FBI are sworn to protect both security and liberty. It isn't a question of conflict. We must care deeply about protecting liberty through due process of law, while also safeguarding the citizens we serve - in every investigation.

We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not - nor will we ever - monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people, including subjecting our activities to rigorous oversight from numerous internal and external sources.

I am a common man. Why do I need security?

Law enforcement, however, in defeating the criminal, must maintain inviolate the historic liberties of the individual.

It doesn’t keep us safe and it doesn’t keep us free if we give up our liberties to the government.

The best thing we did with the Patriot Act was to sunset it. Almost 800 foreign nationals, immigrants, mostly Arab-Americans or people who looked like Arab-Americans, were arrested, put in jail, held without charges, no notification for their families and no right to counsel. That's un-American and I'll fight to end that. If we fight the terrorists who attacked us because of our liberties by compromising our liberties, shame on us.

All persons have the right to privacy and to intimacy.

The people are frightened. When they are frightened, they are much more willing to give us their liberties. But giving up their liberties won't make them safer, that's the real sad part of it.

If we give up all our privacy rights, have we become any safer?

Since the first Patriot Act, as this has evolved, more and more of the privacy of Americans is disappearing. And that’s going to hurt us; it’s not going to make us safer.

Security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can have both

There is a need to accept a limited disruption of civil liberties in order to penetrate terror.

I am ready to debate how we fight terrorism without giving up our liberty.

I don't have a problem with stepped-up surveillance as long as we follow the rule of law.