Rights quotes
4.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"It has been hard to get my head around how Justice Antonin Scalia rationalizes his decisions. His body blow to the Voting Rights Act was a head scratcher, but at least he was calm when he attempted to justify his odd logic."
"For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement."
"Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights."
"No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men."
"The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men."
"There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights."
"Of the many rights of ladies, the best should be to be considered a mother."
"Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited."
"The social compact sets up among the citizens as equality of such kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all enjoy the same rights."
"To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties."
"With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all."
"My goal in signing these [gun control ] bills is to enhance public safety by tightening our existing laws in a responsible and focused manner, while protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners."
"All rights and laws are still transmitted, Like an eternal sickness to the race. [Ger., Es erben sich Gesetz and Rechte Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort.]"
"Time does not relinquish its rights, either over human beings or over mountains."
"There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it."
"If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them well."
"And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights -- the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation – the right to breathe air as nature provided it -- the right of future generations to a healthy existence?" (John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963, American University speech)"
"The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln."
"I believe it is my obligation to tell the story of the civil rights movement to the next generation."
"For a person [like John Lewis] that is a champion of voter rights to question whether or not Donald Trump legitimately won an election or not is an incredible position to take five days before an inauguration."
