Quotes About Rights

There is a doctrine whispered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.

All men are created equal.

All men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.

We ask to be recognized as men.

They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man.

Away with that folly that her rights would be detrimental to her character - that if she were recognized as the equal to a man she would cease to be a woman!

There is one class of men, whom it especially behoves to be tenacious of the right of free discussion. I mean the poor.

The taste which men have for liberty and that which they feel for equality are, in fact, two different things...among democratic nations they are two unequal things.

In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.

All men are not created equal but should be treated as though they were under the law.

The only stable principle of government is equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own.

There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.

They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith.

The greatest inheritance that a man hath is the liberty of his person, for all others are accessory to it.

Liberty'''.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.

Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American… [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.", Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

Extreme law is often extreme injustice.

If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.

The 'Declaration of Independence' begins: 'All men are created equal'. What they really meant was 'All men are created equal – unless they happen to be Indian, black or female'!)

I respect someone's right to privacy and I want them to know it.