Quotes About Rights

Anyone who interprets or defines your rights controls your destiny.

I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods(...) When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.

Universal experience," he began, proved the necessity of "the most express declarations and reservations … to protect the just rights and liberty of Mankind from the Silent, powerful, and ever active conspiracy of those who govern." The new Constitution should therefore "be bottomed upon a declaration, or Bill of Rights, clearly and precisely stating the principles upon which the Social Compact is founded.

According to the legal historian Akhil Reed Amar, before the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, "the Supreme Court never—not once—referred to the 1792 decalogue as 'the' or 'a' bill of rights.

For the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are "things." For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.

I have a right to be angry, to show it and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle, just as I have a right to love and to express my love to the world and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle because I live in history at a time of possibility and not of determinism.

As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.

The restraints imposed by the former oppressed on their oppressors, so that the latter cannot resume their former position, do not constitute oppression . An act is oppressive only when it prevents men from from being more fully human... Behaviour which prevents the restoration of the oppressive regime cannot be compared with the acts by which few men deny the majority their right to be human.

There has been in recent years excessive emphasis on a citizen's rights and inadequate stress put upon his duties and responsibilities.

I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.

Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.

You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circle less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights.

Can man be free if women be a slave?

Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.

Many of us still suffer unnecessarily from abdicating such basic rights as the right to say no, the right to be treated with respect, and the right to have our own feelings, opinions, and preferences. Our health and future growth depends on us claiming and exercising these rights.

But exacerbating those differences was exactly what Nixon had in mind. Years later, former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman would write that the president took great pleasure "in constructing a political dilemma for the labor union leaders and the civil rights groups.

All rights which can be realized in court arise from some event which happens in the world.

I really think the Patriot Act violates our Constitution. It was, it is, an illegal act. The Congress, the Senate and the president cannot change the Constitution.

America was founded by rugged individuals who created government to secure their rights and leave them alone. Americans today want government to violate other people's rights, steal their stuff, and give it to them. The home of the free has become the land of the freeloader.

Make no mistake about this: destroy the liberty of the least among us and you destroy the principle that guarantees liberty to all.

The Micklethwaite family who owned and ran Cuckoo Farm were huddled in a group, sleepy and bewildered in thick coats thrown on over their pajamas. Three kids, aged between seven and twelve, were clinging to their parents. An old woman, whom Sid took to be the grandmother, was starting to argue with an agent, her croaky voice rising. She was claiming a lot of rights, as well as being insulting about Nazis and corrupt government officials.

We exercised our democratic right to protest, and they ignored us.

Underneath the drones, the pedestrians and board riders along Plough Lane had stopped to look around in confusion as power and digital connectivity was taken from them—basic human rights since before they were born

She compares up, to the First World, where privileges are treated as rights. I compare down, to the apocalyptic Africa that presses in around us, where rights are only for the privileged. After covering wars in Mozambique, Angola, Uganda, Somalia, and Sudan, Zimbabwe feels to me like Switzerland.