Quotes About Rights

Charles Maddox noted that "when I am told that the flag means 'nigger on top,' and that I can't stand under it and cast my ballot without asking a nigger's permission, then I think it is time to rescue the flag from the infamy that threatens

There is simply no evidence tending to show that the South would have voluntarily abandoned slavery. The evidence is that the Southern states had openly abridged the Constitution of the United States, especially the Bill of Rights, in behalf of the institution.

All sentient beings should have at least one right—the right not to be treated as property

Veganism is an act of nonviolent defiance. It is our statement that we reject the notion that animals are things and that we regard sentient nonhumans as moral persons with the fundamental moral right not to be treated as the property or resources of humans.

Speciesism is morally objectionable because, like racism, sexism, and heterosexism, it links personhood with an irrelevant criterion. Those who reject speciesism are committed to rejecting racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination as well.

The problem with today's world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!

Justice: To seek it, one must be willing to give up the right to privacy, as nothing more private will become more public.

John Finnis observed that, since there is no doctrine of subjective rights in Aquinas and there is such a doctrine in Suarez, a "watershed" must be situated somewhere between the thirteenth century and the seventeenth. But this view rests on the fallacy, widespread among modern jurists and philosophers who are not medieval specialists, that if an idea is not to be found in Aquinas it is not really a medieval idea at all.

One day, her husband slapped her face. When she complained to her father, he told her God gave husbands the right to beat their wives as stated in the verse of Al-Nisa' sura.[152] Then she began to wonder how God could give the right to a husband to abandon and beat his wife … How could that be when Islam forbids beating animals? Are women inferior to animals?

I refuse to consign the whole male sex to the nursery. I insist on believing that some men are my equals.

Unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure--its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave forever.

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. It is about choice, and having the power to control how you present yourself to the world.

My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.

A dignified decent living is not too much to ask. Where you take it from there is up to you but that much should be a birthright.

My personal feeling, if I can interject a political note, is that I don't think it is right that basic health care is a privilege. It shouldn't be. It should be a right of all human beings. And certainly in the richest country in the world.

The opposite of poverty is not wealth. … In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.

If America is about anything, she is about freedom. We have seen in the burgeoning Department of Homeland Security and at our airports and in the color-coded alerts the beginning of the erosion of that freedom.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.

Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores; let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God's right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world; there is no telling who does not own a stone in the Great Wall of China.

They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.

Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?

When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.

The laws that took the vote away from blacks—poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications—also often ensured that poor whites would not vote. And the political leaders of the South knew this.