"I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death." - George Carlin
"You citizens only have the right to pursue happiness - you're not allowed to be happy." - Ambiguous government agents, in Dilbert
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." - Louis D. Brandeis
"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own... Who ever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." - Benjamin Franklin
"What did the founding fathers say about the dangers of FRACTIONS in Federalist 10 and 51?" - Andrew D. Goldstein
"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)
"[Even] Assuming that Bellesiles' claims hold water, his attack on the Second Amendment is akin to attacking the First Amendment on the grounds that not as many people actually read newspapers as first thought. Would Americans relinquish the right to a free press on such grounds?" - Simon Holroyd
"But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law," because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual." - Thomas Jefferson
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." - Thomas Jefferson
"Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." - Thomas Jefferson
"America is the land of opportunity, not the land of free lunch" - Sean McDermott
"I say we create a new airline, called the ACLA, the American Civil Liberties Airline where you don’t check anybody, you don’t ask any questions, and let those morons fly on that one." - Dennis Miller
“Of course we have to profile people. We live in some weird time now where we're all trying to convince each other that we shouldn’t profile people. When 19 out of 20 people are from a certain country, and they blow up the two biggest buildings in your country, if you don’t start looking at people who are visiting here from that country, you’re not being open-minded. You’re being dead. Okay?" - Dennis Miller
"The ACLU spent this entire holiday season protesting public displays of the nativity scene. Yeah, that's the problem with America right now: Public displays of Christ's birth, that's the problem. It's unbelievable to me. The ACLU will no longer fight for your right to put up a nativity scene, but they'll fight for the right of the local freak who wants to stumble onto the scene and have sex with one of the sheep." - Dennis Miller
"America wasn't founded so that we all could be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damn well please." - P.J. O'Rourke
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
"The problem with Jacksonian Democracy was the extent to which the policies it pursued reflected the personal idiosyncrasies of the chief executive, rather than the needs of the nation." - Edward M. Pessen
"Like the professors in the ACTA report, Susan Sontag, too, claimed that her freedom of speech was being placed in jeopardy. In this peculiar reading of the First Amendment, she is free to say anything she likes, but the right to free speech ends where criticism of what she has said begins. Actually, with rare exceptions, the only attempts to stifle dissent on the campus were directed at the many students and the few faculty members who supported the 9/11 war. All these attempts could be encapsulated into a single phenomenon: on a number of campuses, students or professors who displayed American flags or patriotic posters were forced to take them down." - Norman Podhoretz
"The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right." - William Safire
"Doing away with the Electoral College would breach our fidelity to the spirit of the Constitution, a document expressly written to thwart the excesses of majoritarianism." - John Samples
"I don't know any other area where we... decide the case by saying, well, there are very few people being treated unconstitutionally." - Justice Antonin Scalia, on Affirmative Action, during arguments for Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.
"What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?" - sdo1, Slashdot talkback
"It's funny how you ultra-liberals think that when you censor/shout down/'up your campaigning' that it's free speech, and when other viewpoints choose to present what they want with their own resources, they're 'censors.'" - Anonymous Coward, Slashdot talkback