Quotes About Rights

You can't turn individual human beings into baby-making machines.

I support same-sex marriage.

Everybody should be free to love and marry who they want.

It's not like the right for gay people to marry just happened.

It's not just about being free to marry who you want, you now want to have men using women's bathrooms.

I'm an educated woman, and I don't believe in marrying off a 15-year-old girl.

You can't, in the 21st century, continue to live in a system where people live under martial law for 30 years.

Women do not count," said the Sultan. "Therefore, it is impossible to be unfair to them.

The job Chrestomanci has is to make sure this world isn't run entirely by witches. Ordinary people have rights too.

Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.

Can there be any liberty," wrote James Otis in 1763, "where property is taken without consent?

In college I read John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which contains this thrilling declaration: "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."23 We seem to have gone, in one generation, from the bracing atmosphere of Mill's On Liberty to the dark, dank atmosphere of Orwell's 1984.

Over the Democrats' opposition, Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment securing for blacks equal rights under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment giving blacks the right to vote.

The institutions of black enslavement and white supremacy did not exist before Democrats in the South created them. The very same institutions then became the mechanisms that Democrats used to build their power, and also to repel and defeat attempts by Republicans to extend rights and opportunities to black Americans.

Let the sun be proud of its achievement." He added, "It is evident that white and black 'must fall or flourish together.' In the light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion ought to be repealed . . . and every right, privilege, and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color.

Resistance to usurpation is possible provided the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them.1 —Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist

For nearly a century following the Civil War, the Republican Party made valiant efforts, often against near-impossible odds, to protect blacks from the Democratic onslaught and to secure their basic rights. At times these measures worked; at other times, they proved far too feeble to control the vicious racists in the Democratic Party.

The Republican ethos underlying these landmark provisions was aptly framed by the great abolitionist Republican, Frederick Douglass. Douglass said, "It is evident that white and black must fall or flourish together. In light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion, and every right, privilege and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color."2

This was the clarion cry taken up by the GOP in the aftermath of the Civil War. Virtually all the black leaders who emerged from that era were Republicans who supported the GOP's call to remove race as the basis of government policy and social action. Historian Eric Foner writes that black activists of the antebellum era embraced "an affirmation of Americanism that insisted blacks were entitled to the same rights and opportunities that white citizens enjoyed."3

the Declaration of Independence does not mean we are equal in endowments, only in rights.

Consequently, it was Democrats who, from the 1860s through the 1960s, prevented blacks as a group from enjoying their rights through political opposition and violent acts of terror. Democrats now claim credit for allowing blacks to have the civil rights that they themselves violently prevented for a hundred years.

The earliest opponents of slavery in America were Christians, mostly Quakers and evangelical Christians. They took seriously the biblical idea that we are all equal in the eyes of God, and interpreted it to mean that no person has the right to rule another person without his consent.

Inequality of outcomes is not seen as a necessary evil that government should seek to remedy; rather, the government itself exists to guard citizens' right to accumulate unequal fortunes and property.

Democrats on the Supreme Court also forged the majority in the notorious Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery and insisted that blacks have no rights that a white man needs to respect. Democratic presidents after Jackson—from Polk to Buchanan—protected slavery from abolitionist, free soil, and Republican attack.