Quotes About Rights

Bruce Springsteen, a long-time gay rights activist, has cancelled his North Carolina concert. He says the NC law #HB2 to prevent men from being able to use women's restrooms and locker rooms is going "backwards instead of forwards." Well, to be honest,

In Oakeshott's view, ideas like natural law, fundamental values, basic rights, and "justice as fairness" are detrimental to the rule of law: "more often than not they are the occasion of profitless dispute, and when invoked as the conditions of the obligation to observe the conditions prescribed by lex they positively pervert the association: they are the recipe for anarchy" (OH 16o).

A society can never be free without women's liberation

War. Rape. Murder. Poverty. Equal rights for gays. Guess which one the Southern Baptist Convention is protesting?

Du hast vergessen, daß Liebende heilig sind. Auch wenn sie sich irren, Joh; selbst ihr Irrtum ist heilig. Auch wenn sie Narren sind, Joh; selbst ihre Narrheit ist heilig. Denn wo Liebende sind, ist der Garten Gottes, und niemand hat das Recht, sie daraus zu vertreiben. Nicht einmal Gott.

And we even recognise the apparent paradox that some limitations to our freedoms have the consequence of making us freer overall.

Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.

The only tyrannies from which men, women and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities.

Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.

My position as regards the monied interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run, identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand; for property belongs to man and not man to property.

We cordially believe in the rights of property. We think that normally and in the long run the rights of humanity, coincide with the rights of property... But we feel that if in exceptional cases there is any conflict between the rights of property and the rights of man, then we must stand for the rights of man.

I now believe as sincerely as ever, for all the laws that the wit of man can devise will never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardful of the rights of others.

The majority in a democracy has no more right to tyrannize over a minority than, under a different system, the latter would to oppress the former

for all the laws that the wit of man can devise will never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardful of the rights of others.

The rights of property are in less jeopardy from the Socialists and the Anarchists than from the predatory man of wealth…

We Progressives believe that the people have the right and the duty to protect themselves and their own welfare; that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that wealth should be the servant, not the master, of the people. We believe that if representative government does not absolutely represent the people it is not representative government at all.

A new way of looking is needed in a world which believes that every individual has a right to flower, within limits, in his or her own way.

But Hamilton lost the day, Jefferson won, and we have a Bill of Rights built into our Constitution that, as Hamilton feared, has increasingly been used to limit, rather than expand, the range of human rights American citizens can claim. And because it's in our Constitution, the only way other than a Supreme Court decision to make explicit "new" rights (such as a right to health care) is through the process of amending that document.

Humans are born with human rights. Those human rights are inherent—

the Constitution was designed not to give us rights but to prevent government from taking our rights.

generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. [It] says what the states can't do to you. [It] says what the federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.

Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women's prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation. Yet over the past century—and particularly the past forty years—corporations have repeatedly asserted that they are, in fact, "persons" and therefore eligible for the human rights protections of the Bill of Rights.

His concern was that if there were a few rights specified in the Constitution, future generations may forget that those are just examples and that the Constitution itself protects all human rights.

Corporations haven't limited their grasp to the First Amendment; pretty much any and virtually every amendment that could be used to further corporate interests has been fair game.