Quotes About Rights

Democ'acy gives every man The right to be his own oppressor...

Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don't think.

Franklin smiled benevolently at the questioner, and quickly, blandly, he replied, "My friend, the Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself!"

This is a celebration of individual freedom, not of homosexuality. No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

...rights are not won on paper. They are won only by those who make their voices heard — by activists and militants. Silence never won rights. They are not handed down from above; they are forced by pressures from below.

I have always claimed America didn't want a drink as bad as they wanted the right to take a drink if they did happen to want one.

That is new-womanish talk," he frowned. "Equal rights, the ballot, and all that.

T'sain shrugged. "I have lived little, and I am not wise. Yet I know that everyone is entitled to life.

acquired a terrible reputation for abusing people who served them. The Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs strongly defended the monks at court and imposed a host of special rights for them. At one point the bureau tried to enforce laws that stipulated that anyone who hit a monk would have his hand

Every war is a war against the child. —Eglantyne Jebb, 1876–1928 Founder of Save the Children, 1919, Jebb drafted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1924

I quite understand how we are driven to lead statistical lives, but I repeat that it is the duty of art to make us imagine the particular; to make us understand that the rights of one human being are not a fraction of the rights of more than one, and at the same time that in any situation of collective evil, the suffering is felt by no more than one person; only one feels the bitter agony of injustice, only one dies

It is just that there be law, but law is not justice

A man charged with a crime has a right to a lawyer, and when the community is most strongly against him, his right is morally greatest.

Nor was Israel's historic claim to the land impressive; to Cullinane it was irrelevant. Once a man started opening the historical-rights barrel of eels, no one could predict where the slippery evidence might run.

The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it 'ominous' when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don't we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we're going to have to defend ourselves against you?

For the history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the nation.

Why, for example—especially knowing the family as I do—I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.

We cannot be free until they are free.

There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.

When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement's second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of "violence" was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth.