"The Soviet Union is going to have a human-rights explosion. You'll have hundreds of thousands of dissidents."
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Rights quotes
Rights
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Rights quotes (page 29 of 210)
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"Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That's what I've been doing all my life."
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"There's no problem on the planet that can't be solved without violence. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement."
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"In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties."
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"[T]he moralists of Europe [have] pretended that beasts have no rights... a doctrine revolting/gross/barbarous... on which a native of the Asiatic uplands could not look without righteous horror."
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"Human rights and rule of law are inseparably connected."
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"In a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear. Never let fear prevent you from doing right."
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"If a man speculates on what 'society' should do for the poor, he accepts thereby the collectivist premise that men's lives belong to society and that he, as a member of society, has the right to dispose of them...that psychological confession reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men's capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life."
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"The right to life is the source of all rights -- and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave."
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"I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life."
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"There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights."
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"If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor."
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"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence."
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"Whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all."
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"Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob."
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"The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men."
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"Those who have been outspoken in advocating human rights during these last forty years, have themselves grabbed the most fundamental of human rights from the people of the Third-World countries."
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"The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market."
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"If [Western] relations with Russia are to be friendly, they must be open and sincere, otherwise there can be no friendship at all. That means one should be able to speak openly about everything at meetings and conferences. It shouldn't be that we can't discuss the killing of journalists in Russia, or the suppression of human rights, or all the warning signs surfacing in Russia because of oil and gas or other economic reasons. It's a big problem, but it's the same in Western relations with Arab states."
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"It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights."
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