Rights quotes
4.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I sound like a church nut, but look at the role of the churches in the civil rights movement in the States. People are brought together in other ways that can become drivers of change."
"We do not keep security establishments merely to defend property or territory or rights abroad or at sea. We keep the security forces to defend a way of life."
"I'm awful dull, but I hope I've beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!"
"Friendship has no civil, and few emotional, rights in our society."
"The whole reason for the success of Dr. King's civil-rights movement was that it was not a movement for itself. The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all."
"I'm not pessimistic, because poor people tend to bounce back. We've been through worse than this - working people been through worse than this. We've got slavery and Jim Crow. We've got workers with no rights up until `35. We're going to bounce back. We are resilient, resisting people. So, it's not pessimism, but it is blues-like. It's not optimistic. We're just prisoners of hope, that's all."
"The reason is, and by rights ought to be, slave to the emotions."
"My own experience has taught me not to underestimate the power of those who protest against cruelty. I'd also say that there may be a tendency to view the animal-rights opposition in somewhat distorted fashion as a new development, as the product of a very recent enlightenment about the rights due to animals."
"Animals are complicated and so is the animal-rights opposition. It's hard to read motives in animals, and hard to read motives in politics."
"Yet it seems to me finishing well in this life is not so much about who is the best or greatest at something, but rather who embraces lowliness of heart. Laying down one's rights- meekness- is a blessed virtue, one that must surely come straight from the Throne of Grace."
"Are gun rights advocates arguing that roving gangs...shooting innocent bystanders constitutes a 'well-regulated militia'?"
"They kill people here who stand up for their rights The system's just too damned corrupt It's always the same, the name of the game Is who do you know higher up"
"I expect to see the day when the Elders of Israel will protect and sustain civil and religious liberty and every Constitutional right bequeathed to us by our fathers, and spread these rights abroad in connection with the Gospel for the salvation of all nations. I shall see this whether I live or die."
"What we have seen in recent years in the United States is the church's rights to express itself, and to conduct its own affairs, being insidiously eroded."
"I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises."
"Can we say that the constitutional monarchies in Spain, Belgium or England are democratic? Those with superior chambers like the House of Lords in England, that still represent the English feudal nobility in terms of positions above regional representatives, who are in the end the representatives supposedly elected by the population. Many mechanisms exist, but they are mechanisms to preserve the power of the wealthy classes, of the bourgeois classes that hold the power and rights above the rest of the society."
"When we speak of the origin of western democracy it's precisely here, in this territory that the modern definition of democracy first emerged in city/states known now as Greece. This was coming from a society in which 30 thousand citizens had rights and 300 thousand were slaves and citizens without rights that lived in this territory. So that was the concept of western democracy; some citizens had the prerogative of exerting their civil and political rights while the others had none."
"Let's not use the term democracy as a play on words which is what people commonly do, using human rights as a pretext. Those people that really violate human rights [the West] violate human rights from all perspectives. Typically on the subject of human rights regarding the nations from the south and Cuba they say, "They are not democratic societies, they do not respect human rights, and they do not respect freedom of speech"."
"Without the means to prevent, and to control the timing of, conception, economic and political rights have limited meaning for women. If women cannot plan their pregnancies, they can plan little else in their lives."
"... statism systematically violates the rights of individuals and is, therefore, immoral. Because it suppresses the mind and violates men's rights, it thereby causes abysmal poverty and is utterly impractical."
