Rights quotes
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"When shallow critics denounce the profit motive inherent in our system of private enterprise, they ignore the fact that it is an economic support of every human right we possess and without it, all rights would disappear."
"There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders."
"Material goods consist of useful material things, and of all rights to hold, or use, or derive benefits from material things, or to receive them at a future time."
"I can't remember when I wasn't an animal rights activist."
"For most of the world, civil and political rights... come as luxuries that are far away in the future."
"Without property rights, no other rights are possible."
"One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living."
"Any group or "collective," large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the "rights" of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights."
"Thou art blind to the danger of marrying a woman who feels and acts out the principle of equal rights."
"They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man."
"It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so."
"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions."
"If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system."
"God has formed us moral agents... that we may promote the happiness of those with whom He has placed us in society, by acting honestly towards all, benevolently to those who fall within our way, respecting sacredly their rights, bodily and mental, and cherishing especially their freedom of conscience, as we value our own."
"If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require."
"The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights."
"The oppressed should rebel, and they will continue to rebel and raise disturbance until their civil rights are fully restored to them and all partial distinctions, exlusions, and incapacitations are removed."
"The partisan when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions."
"We know that if one man's rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered."
"The Bible and its teachings helped form the basis for the Founding Fathers' abiding belief in the inalienable rights of the individual."
