Each state, so that it does not abridge the great fundamental rights belonging, under the Constitution, to all citizens, may grant or withhold such civil rights as it pleases; all that is required is that, in this respect, its laws shall be impartial.
Lyman Trumbull

First of all I would make about 80% of the people law-abiding citizens again. The policy which is carried out now makes every entrepreneur and businessman a thief against his own will.
Aleksandr Lebed

The lands granted were in the occupancy of savages and situated in a wilderness, of which the government had never taken possession, and of which it could not with its own citizens ever have taken possession.
William H. Wharton

A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.
Ray Stannard Baker

Most of the State of the Union will not be about Iraq. Most of the State of the Union will be about improving America's economy and providing greater access to health care for millions of American people, including senior citizens.
Ari Fleischer

If we are to perpetuate the state, we must not only produce citizens, but good citizens - men and women of sound bodies, clear minds and clean souls.
Arthur Capper

We want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.
Grover Norquist

Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right.
Joseph Sobran

We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.
Dora Russell

When you have police officers who abuse citizens, you erode public confidence in law enforcement. That makes the job of good police officers unsafe.
Mary Frances Berry

What other nations call religious toleration, we call religious rights. They are not exercised in virtue of governmental indulgence, but as rights, of which government cannot deprive any portion of citizens, however small.
Richard Mentor Johnson

Class action lawsuits are an important part of our legal system. All citizens should have the right to band together and settle grievances with bigger companies, but that system is broken and it needs fixing.
Thomas Carper

The Constitution of the United States was made by white men, the citizens and representatives of twelve slaveholding and one non-slaveholding State; and it was made for white men.
John H. Reagan

I once knew a chap who had a system of just hanging the baby on the clothes line to dry and he was greatly admired by his fellow citizens for having discovered a wonderful innovation on changing a diaper.
Damon Runyon

Be assured, fellow citizens, that in a democracy it is the laws that guard the person of the citizen and the constitution of the state, whereas the despot and the oligarch find their protection in suspicion and in armed guards.
Aeschines

Ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think is most reasonable to enact.
John Rawls

Let us walk into the conference room as equals and not second class citizens.
Martin McGuinness

State government has too often been used to look out for the insiders and not the citizens. This has insulated poverty from progress, and need from remedy.
Ernie Fletcher

Disapproval of homosexuality cannot justify invading the houses, hearts and minds of citizens who choose to live their lives differently.
Harry A. Blackmun

It has to have a payroll tax that's dedicated to Social Security. The Social Security tax has been very successful over the years in raising almost all of our elderly citizens out of poverty.
James Roosevelt