Quotes About Rights

The greatest right of a civilized person is to be left alone, unless he does harm to others or is threatening to do harm to himself.

it cannot be allowable for the government, on the pleading of some of the people, to establish a right solely for the purpose of withholding it from some other people. If this were to happen, it would amount to a punishment imposed on a disfavored group for no crime except their existence. I don't need to point out that this has happened before.

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate "relationship" involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended.

when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people's products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink.

There is no good reason for the government to treat homosexuals as a special category of persons.

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

equality is at once the most natural and the most chimerical thing in the world: natural when it is limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts to level goods and powers.

All political philosophy, Spinoza thins, must grow out of a distinction between the natural and the moral order...without law or social organization...might and right were one...The rights of states are now what the rights of individuals used to be (and still often are), that is, they are mights...among men, as mutual need begets mutual aid...passes into a moral order of rights. (Chapter on Spinoza, p.191/543)

Laws against free speech are subversive of all law; for men will not long respect laws which they may not criticize.

To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed[.]

A right is not a gift of God or nature but a privilege which it is good for the group that the individual should have.

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

On August 26 the Assembly responded by conferring French citizenship upon Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Anacharsis Cloots, Johann Pestalozzi, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Friedrich Schiller, George Washington, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

But you don't make people safe by giving up their most basic rights What good is being safe if we have no freedom. - Mike

One rule for the lion and ox is oppression.

Liberty is an affair of laws and institutions which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an affair of selecting the proper class to rule.

We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.

are those who have neglected their duties, and consequently have failed to get their rights. The

Limited government that protects rights and freedoms is another important ingredient. For example, it is government's job to protect property rights, keep markets as free and fair as possible, and oppose discrimination in the workplace.

time. In the past, for so many, for as many as six million men and their families, such rights of free men in Germany had been overshadowed, as he said, by the freedom to starve. In taking away that last freedom, Hitler assured himself of the support of the working class

My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian. M.K. Gandhi, Defence in a trial for sedition, 1922

The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.