Quotes About Rights

One reason why false and offensive speech is permitted in most liberal democracies is precisely because the best answer to bad speech is good speech, rather than censorship.

Are you discriminating me?!

No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom - along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

The right to sterilize was about government interference in the reproductive process; the right to abort is about barring government interference in it. But at bottom the moral stake is arguably the same: the sanctity of human life.

Protection," John Stuart Mill wrote, "against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.

Ronald Reagan once quipped, "I've noticed all those in favor of abortion are already born." Indeed, all pro-abortionists would become pro-life immediately if they found themselves back in the womb.

Christianity is one of the few worldviews that can justify absolute human rights because it affirms that those rights are given to us by God. As our founders recognized, governments aren't meant to give or take away rights: governments are meant to secure rights that the people already possess. That's what we affirmed in our Declaration of Independence.

I showed that privacy was an implicit right in Jewish law, probably going back to the second or third century, when it was elaborated on in a legal way.

A child had a right to be a child. Even in Mississippi a girl was a girl till her time came. White folks or no white folks. Nobody sent a little ol' thing out to take up for the whole damn race.

Freedom is dangerous but it's precious, too. You can't just throw it away or let it slip away. You can't sell it for bread and pottage.

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they've been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don't much matter.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

O kraju ?wiadcz? jego Zwierz?ta. Stosunek do Zwierz?t. Je?eli ludzie zachowuj? si? bestialsko wobec Zwierz?t, nie pomo?e im ?adna demokracja ani w ogóle nic.

But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the green in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse?

Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right?

Un citoyen ignoré par l'administration est, d'une certaine façon, voué à la non-existence. Il ne faut toutefois pas ignorer qu'une personne privée de ses droits n'a nul devoir à accomplir.

If some people got their rights they would complain of being deprived of their wrongs.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics.

was no mean achievement to have given a Bill of Rights to a country that, until then, had never known any kind of freedom.

There were no peasants doffing their hats here; no one was exempt from paying taxes; all men, in fact, were born equal.

The rights of democracy are not reserved for a select group within society, they are the rights of all the people.