Quotes About Rights

Gratitude is a way of seeing ourselves as recipients of blessings rather than demanders of rights.

Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete

This 'shocking realism'52 has often surprised and upset Augustine's readers. But, given the immense authority of the writer, this view shaped Christian political sensibilities ever after: Christian writers could not condemn suggestions for liberalizing the state, or even for dispensing with monarchies. Moreover, by affirming the secularity of kingship the Church made it possible to examine the basis for worldly power and the interplay of rights and rule.

Indeed, if the Framers intended unenumerated rights to be protected without a bill of rights, how can we imagine that those rights were meant to be any less secure with a bill of rights.

Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them.

Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined?

At the same time, instead of limiting the power of the state, alleged human rights have begun to enhance that power, and to bring the state into all our disputes on the side of the favoured party. Rights

The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This

This law is implanted in us by reason, and God himself obeys it. If human beings do not obey the natural law it is because reason does not entirely govern their behavior. The purpose of a legal is to provide an effective substitute for reason in the motives of unreasonable men. He added, however, that rights are nothing without the power which would enforce them, and therefore that power, not right, is the basic fact of politics." -Spinoza

Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives – which means being free both to grant and to withhold consent respecting whatever relations may be proposed to them. Individual sovereignty exists only where the state guarantees rights, such as the right to life, limb and property, so protecting citizens from invasion and coercion by others, including invasion and coercion by the state.

It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists

For the socialist, men are equal in their needs, and should therefore be equal in all that is granted to them for the satisfaction of their needs. For the liberal, they are equal in their rights, and should therefore be equal in all that affects their social and political standing.

Without a criterion enabling us to distinguish genuine human rights from the many impostors we will never be sure that our legal provisions, however wise, benevolent and responsible, will be secure against the individual desire to escape from them.

Furthermore, we can understand those basic freedoms as rights partly because we can understand the reciprocal duty to respect them. My right to life is your duty not to kill me: and duties of non-encroachment and non-infliction are naturally upheld by morality and easily enforced by the law. However

el comunismo que preconizaba Marx entraña una contradicción: es una situación en la que se disfruta de todas las ventajas que tiene el orden legal, pero no existe la ley; en la que se logran todos los beneficios de la cooperación social, a pesar de que nadie goza de esos derechos de propiedad que, hasta la fecha, han sido los que han hecho posible precisamente la cooperación.

People become free individuals by learning to take responsibility for their actions. And they do this through relating to others, subject to subject. The free individuals to whom the Founders appealed were free only because they had grown through the bonds of society, to the point of taking full responsibility for their actions and granting to each other the rights and privileges that established a kind of moral equality between them.

There can be no happiness without fairness

I almost forgot to tell you - you have the right to remain silent, but if you do, my boys at the station will process your bones to help you confess.

I think that we Americans, at least in the Southern col[onie]s, cannot contend with a good grace for liberty until we shall have enfranchised our slaves," Laurens told a friend right before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In one glowing passage, Hamilton invoked the colonists' natural rights: "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

Reconstruction was a fine but ultimately doomed experiment in American life. The tragedy of this intractable issue was that there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible.

The blessings and protection of Heaven are at all times necessary, but especially so in times of public distress and danger," he assured his men, hoping "that every officer and man will endeavor so to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country.