Rights quotes
4.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Is driving a right? You are entitled to a driving license if you can abide by the traffic laws and drive responsibly. If your driving endangers the lives of others, that license will be taken away from you. So rights and responsibilities are inseparable. If you can't respect the rights of others, if by your belief and conduct you endanger the lives of other people, you are not entitled to any right."
"I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general."
"Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression "individual rights"? is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression "collective rights"? is a contradiction in terms."
"Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights; it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is man's deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written."
"Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba, or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexistent 'rights' of gang rulers. It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses."
"Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men havethe same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable."
"The goal of #BDS is the full restoration of Palestinian rights, not an agreement to create an artificial mini-state in order to save Zionism"
"When I think of the flag.... I see alternate strips of parchment upon which are written the rights of liberty and justice, and stripes of blood to vindicate those rights, and then, in the corner, a prediction of the blue serene into which every nation may swim which stands for these great things."
"I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify."
"Man's rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature."
"If you hear me out, I believe you'll discover that what motivates me more than any other issue is the defense of everyone's rights."
"All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws"
"Toward all other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of cordial and sincere friendship. We must show not only in our words, but in our deeds, that we are earnestly desirous of securing their good will by acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their rights."
"The woman has the right to be emancipated from the position of a drudge or a toy. She is entitled to a full equality in rights with man."
"Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere."
"[O]ur rules can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God."
"All... natural rights may be abridged or modified in [their] exercise by law."
"The equal rights of man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government."
"The States should be watchful to note every material usurpation on their rights; to denounce them as they occur in the most peremptory terms; to protest against them as wrongs to which our present submission shall be considered, not as acknowledgments or precedents of rights, but as a temporary yielding to the lesser evil, until their accumulation shall overweigh that of separation."
"A truly Suppressive Person or group has no rights of any kind and actions taken against them are not punishable."
