Best Quotable I've Seen For Awhile Now

[Annie]

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/007839.html

"Rights" not bourgeois liberties
Guy Herbert (London) Opinions on liberty
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'Just let us put in place our hierarchy of rights. The right to live. The right to go to work on the underground. The right to have an ID card. The right not to have data abused.' NO! Not this

- Charles Clarke to MEPs before the second bombing, talking up data retention.

Rather this:
Freedom has no natural place in a "hierarchy of rights". Freedom used to be what was left over when other people's rights to their choices were taken into account. But the priesthood seems keen to ensure that there are "rights" everywhere, with no space for anything else, and that "rights" are not options, they are compulsions. Lenin would be proud.