Quotes about rights
Martin Luther King Jr. - Jr.
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
Wilhelm Reich -
Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word "freedom" should ever be more than an empty political slogan.
Carl Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands be
Jack R. Rose - The Cedar Post
Peace of mind comes when we exercise our right to be honest, especially with ourselves.
M.F. Moonzajer - HATRED AND MADNESS
Never kill yourself because you are too poor to feed your children or your family. You are a part of this world, and the country you live on it. It is your right to be happy, educated and with your children and family. You must fight for your rights, kill for your rights but never die for them.
Sunday Adelaja - The Mountain of Ignorance
When insulted by injustice, face it, stand up against it and demand your right and justice.
Sunday Adelaja - The Mountain of Ignorance
You are a lawmaker in your own right.
Anthony Liccione -
We are all dust passing through the air, the difference is, some are flying high in the sky, while others are flying low. But eventually, we all settle on the same ground.
T.F. Hodge - From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
If the thought inspires you, and it feels good and right...it is yours, alone, to exercise. So get right on it!
Robert G. Ingersoll - Woman and Child
This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself. Keep your mind open to the influences of nature. Receive new thoughts with hospitality. Let us advance.
Sarah Vowell -
The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject - that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States - kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian school children heeded FDR's call to scrounge up rubber for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot
Jane Addams -
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Dr. J. Otis Yoder - Biblical Economics
The divine order of human society from primeval days was based upon certain rights conveyed by the Creator. The right of position, next to God; the right to procreate, in order to be in charge; the right to procure, in order to survive. These rights of necessity required man to maintain a meaningful and submissive relation to God who bestowed them.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Solitude of Self
We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a
broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest
ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest
triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine
heights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or
saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or
criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs
of our fel
Lena Dunham -
Women saying, 'I'm not a feminist' is my greatest pet peeve. Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs? Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house? Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights? Great, then you're a feminist.
Isabella Poretsis -
If you don't like something don't protest from a far. Work within it to change it. Otherwise, you'll just be one voice of many rather than a trusted voice of influence.
Roxane Gay - Bad Feminist
... just one more reminder that the rules are always different for girls, no matter who they are and no matter what they do.
Pervez Musharraf - In the Line of Fire
When one demands equal rights for women, one needs to assess in which areas women can work better than men, in which they can work like men, and in which they need protection and affirmative action for when they cannot work like men.
Susan Faludi - Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
The anti-feminism bacllash has been set off not by women's achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finishing line.
Thomas Sankara -
I can hear the roar of women's silence
Sojourner Truth -
You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.
Alexis de Tocqueville -
I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.
Craig D. Lounsbrough - A View from the Front Porch: Encounters with Life and Jesus
Too often there is this sinister greed that pulls at my coattails, subtly whispering in the ear of my soul that it is within my rights to tuck away a few dark trinkets to toy with when the tedium of righteous living gets a bit boring. But God would suggest that I empty my pockets.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk -
Human kind is made up of two sexes, women and men. Is it possible that a mass is improved by the improvement of only one part and the other part is ignored? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains and the other half can soar into skies?
Jean Sasson -
I've often observed that women can be the weakest link in women's rights.
J.Adam Snyder -
The rights of the individual are more important than the wishes of the masses.
J.Adam Snyder -
In the ideal state, laws are few and simple. In the corrupt state, they are many and confused.
Barack Obama - The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.
Robert B. Reich -
A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.
Lilikalā K. Kame'eleihiwa -
We, the Hawaiian people, who are born from the union of Papahanaumoku and Wakea, earth mother and sky father, and who have lived in these islands for over 100 generations, will always have the moral right to the lands of Hawai'i now and forever, no matter what any court says.
Frederick Douglass -
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your
Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
Sebastien de Castell -
If not us, then who? Who's going to stand when everyone else kneels? Who's going to argue for the law even when there's no justice to be had? Who's going to try even when the trying is too damn hard?
David Graeber - a Movement
The police can use violence to say, expel citizens from a public park because they are enforcing duly constituted laws. Laws gain their legitimacy from the Constitution. The Constitution gains its legitimacy from something called 'the people.' But how did 'the people' actually grant legitimacy to the Constitution? As the American and French revolutions make clear: basically, through acts of illegal violence. So what gives the police the right to use force to suppress the very thing–a popular upr
Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power in the 1990s as the baby boomers became the establishment. Their targeting of rape, battering, hate crimes, gay-bashing, and child abuse reframed law-and-order from a reactionary cause to a progressive one, and their efforts to make the home, workplace, schools, and streets safer for vulnerable groups (as in the feminist “Take Back the Night” prote
J.S.B. Morse - and a Universal Morality
The story of humanity can be written as the struggle to acknowledge all human beings as human beings.
Sonya Renee Taylor -
Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people's babies.
Edward R. Murrow -
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Izzeldin Abuelaish - I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.
Takayuki Yamaguchi - Shigurui 11
No matter how pathetic or pitiful, every human is fated to have one moment in their lives in which they can change their own destiny.
Salman Rushdie -
Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it. To r
Daniel Pennac -
Reader's Bill of Rights1. The right to not read 2. The right to skip pages 3. The right to not finish 4. The right to reread 5. The right to read anything 6. The right to escapism 7. The right to read anywhere 8. The right to browse 9. The right to read out loud 10. The right to not defend your tastes
Paul Farmer -
It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
Robert Anton Wilson - The Eye in the Pyramid
But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.''What sort of tools?''More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws
Criss Jami - Killosophy
Sometimes a people lose their right to remain silent when pressured to remain silent.
Ayn Rand - Anthem
For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor.
Ron Paul -
You have to remember, rights don't come in groups we shouldn't have 'gay rights'; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn't have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group.
Marvin Simkin -
Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.
Ayn Rand - Anthem
At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of
Alan Moore - V for Vendetta
Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.
Robert G. Ingersoll - Woman and Child
This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.
Lucille Ball -
Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.
Romain Gary - White Dog
...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---.
George Bernard Shaw - Misalliance/The Dark Lady of the Sonnets/Fanny's First Play with a Treatise on Parents and Children
But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.
Jack McCoy -
Man is guaranteed only those rights which he can defend.
Thomas Jefferson -
Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.
D.A. Carson - The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism
Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude: Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our u
Michael J. Sandel - Liberalism and Its Critics
First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.
Werley Nortreus -
So many people from my past taught me that it's not everyone that's in my life wants to see me achieve my goals and be great, but I thank God they're no longer in my life because I moved on a long time ago, welcome to my present.
Beem Weeks -
A choice made having devastating consequences for another is really not a choice. It is an act.
Criss Jami - Healology
Law without reason is criminal.
Sunday Adelaja -
Because of fear, people who have civil rights can’t use them
Gary L. Francione -
All sentient beings should have at least one right—the right not to be treated as property
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
Peace is achieved when our conscience rests in the fact that we’ve engaged in ‘right’ living, verses believing that living is a ‘right.
Gary L. Francione -
We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we an use and kill for our purposes.
Frederick Douglass -
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War
Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Amit Ray -
Stand up for who you are. Respect your Self and ignite the divine sparks in you. Access your powers. Choose your rights and work together with others to bring blessings into the lives.
Isaiah Berlin - The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.
Roseville Nidea -
A 21st century poet is a woman who can speak her mind and stand upright like a mountain with her convictions, but can adapt like water in an ever changing season without losing her genuine elements.
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “rights,” the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful
James C. Dobson - Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
Diversity, rather than cohesiveness, is the new passion, and it pits us against each other for “rights.
E.A. Bucchianeri - Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.
B.R. Ambedkar - Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual
Justice has always evoked ideas of equality, of proportion of compensation. Equity signifies equality. Rules and regulations, right and righteousness are concerned with equality in value.If all men are equal, then all men are of the same essence, and the common essence entitles them of the same fundamental rights and equal liberty... In short justice is another name of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Aristotle -
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.
Henry David Thoreau - Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more
Sara Sheridan -
Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted.
Orrin Woodward -
A society that has no wrongs will soon have no rights.
R.H. Tawney -
So the organisation of society on the basis of functions, instead of on the basis of rights, implies three things. It means, first, that proprietary rights shall be maintained when they are accompanied by the performance of service and abolished when they are not. It means, second, that the producers shall stand in a direct relation to the community for whom production is carried on, so that their responsibility to it may be obvious and unmistakable, not lost, as at present, through their immedi
Michael Foley - The Age Of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard To Be Happy
The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.
Mike Adams -
I believe that feminism has become a political movement that seeks to obtain unlimited rights for woman without corresponding responsibilities via the suppression of feminism.Under my definition, helping oppressed women in other countries falls outside the scope of the movement's interests.
Erin Passons - The Nasty Women Project: Voices from the Resistance
America- often called the land of milk and honey- tends to be sweeter, more generous to those who don't rock the boat. Sarah Mullen
C W Newman - Self: A Treatise on the Nature of Reality
Justice is the alignment of societal laws with natural Law, and the righting of wrongs. Justice creates liberty. Justice maintains the character of love and can be said to be a product of right actions by a society. Things that are right promote the well-being of individual selves and societies. What is right can be said to always be just. If a society commits to justice by aligning societal laws with natural Law and respecting the rights of natural Law, then it will promote love through liberty
Anthony Liccione -
You may not be able to change the world for the better, but the world is able to change you for the worst, don't give them the rock you stand on.
Robert G. Ingersoll -
Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of "inspiration." It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge -- that is to say, of science. When man becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights; when thought is untrammeled; when worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized.
Christine de Pizan - The Selected Writings
Speak gently but look out for your rights.
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.''In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.''Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to
John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose
litymunshi -
there are signs to find ,understand person who is in love _ in little of sickness or in little success ,or failure ,their eyes ,and heart looks for their lovers .this is for both ,to understand depth of human relationship is so strong bonded .
litymunshi -
there are signs to find ,understand person who is in love _ in little of sickness or in little success ,or failure ,their eyes ,and heart looks for their lovers .this is for both ,to understand depth of human relationship.which is so strong bonded .
Warren G. Harding -
Inherent rights are from God, and the tragedies of the world originate in their attempted denial.
Nick Harkaway - The Blind Giant
A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.
Oscar A. Romero - The Violence of Love
For the church, the many abuses of human life, liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering. The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God. As holy defender of God’s rights and of his images, the church must cry out. It takes as spittle in its face, as lashes on its back, as the cross in its passion, all that human beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers. They suffer as God’s images. There
Jay Woodman -
Our true nature is one of innocence and freedom to choose how we live. We need to be brave enough not to give that away. Don't give up on your right to, and sense of, TRUTH, Justice, and GRACE.
Lailah Gifty Akita -
The act of living is a revolutionary right.
Derek Landy - Mortal Coil
You're under arrest for multiple counts of murder. You have the right to not much at all, really. Do you have anything to say in your defense?
Ayn Rand -
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Fulton J. Sheen -
The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.
Vishwas Chavan -
Life is a balancing act. While we have all the rights to be in freedom, peace, harmony and bliss; we do have a responsibility to ensure that others too enjoy their own freedom, peace, harmony and bliss.