Arlen Specter Quotes

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.

We have to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you don't do that, the country would be in ruins.

The national emergency no longer justifies abrogation of individual rights of Habeas Corpus and trial by jury on definite charges.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing...by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values.

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

Until civil rights are enjoyed by all of us, we're simply not civilized.

I'm deeply concerned about Jeff Sessions, who has clearly expressed opposition to the use of consent decrees and has advanced a lot of this states' rights rhetoric.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.

If the FBI parks a van bristling with cameras outside your house, you are justified in closing your blinds.

One thing that does seem to me to be fairly consistent is that presidents who restrict civil liberties, even in wartime, are usually judged harshly for it. So most people agree that one of the worst stains on the reputation of FDR, who is widely considered a great president, is the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Likewise, Lincoln is judged harshly for the suspension of habeas corpus.

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

The freedom of speech is an important yardstick for a society's level of civilization.

As Mazzini said ... it is around the standard of duty rather than around the standard of self-interest that men must rally to win the rights of man. And herein may we see the deep philosophy of Him who bade men love their neighbors as themselves. In that spirit, and in no other, is the power to solve social problems and carry civilization onward.

Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties.

If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog, whether the dog is a police dog or a hound dog or any kind of dog. If a dog is fixed on a black man when that black man is doing nothing but trying to take advantage of what the government says is supposed to be his, then that black man should kill that dog or any two-legged dog who sets the dog on him.

The truth of the matter is that the problem of police shootings and reactions in the community.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

[ J. Edgar]Hoover, I'm sure, felt that he was right in everything he did and even the things that we don't like about his character.

Ted Kennedy's achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.

One way in which all of us can help to combat the current wave of public indecency which threatens to undermine Western civilization is to concentrate upon and increase the solidarity of the family. This solidarity begins with a child at the mother's breast.

Freedom of speech is a two way street, man. You have the right to say whatever you want and the Boss has a right to tell the police to arrest you.

Western civilization is based upon the libertarian principle, and all its achievements are the results of the action of free men.