Rights quotes
4.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"All of my life I've spent a lot of time with gay men - Montgomery Clift, Jimmy Dean, Rock Hudson - who are my colleagues, coworkers, confidantes, my closest friends, but I never thought of who they slept with! They were just the people I loved. I could never understand why they couldn't be afforded the same rights and protections as all of the rest of us. There is no gay agenda, it's a human agenda"
"He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights... it had to be some silly little Communist."
"Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious."
"Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society."
"No matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to standards that we recognize as just. Justice is not revenge - it's deciding for a solution that is oriented towards peace, peace being the harder but more human way of reacting to injury. That is the very basis of the idea of rights."
"Mary Kom is a woman who stood up alone in a male-dominated field and fought for her rights and what she believed in. Her story is an inspiration for every young person out there."
"The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved."
"The issue of human rights is one of the most fundamental human issues and also one of the most sensitive and controversial."
"Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness... We claim them from a higher source - from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives."
"God willing, we shall come to a stage where the world looks at the Palestinian question, and Palestinian rights on Palestinian national soil, as well as the questions of the occupied Syrian and Lebanese territories. These are the bases on which peace will be built."
"If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."
"I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity..."
"My whole life has been about equal rights and opportunities. For me it really goes back to the health of mind, body and soul."
"The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities."
"People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me."
"One of the things I have always said about the man-woman relationship is that I don't want anybody to walk ahead of me and I don't want anybody to walk behind me. I want a man who will walk along beside me. And that's how I feel about equal rights."
"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."
"Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity."
"Success is the power to acquire whatever one demands of life without violating the rights of others."
"But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free."
