Quotes About Rights

You can not possibly have a broader basis for government than that which includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights.

Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril.

That which is not just is not law.

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

Liberty for each, for all, and forever!

this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.

it's bad for you to hold in your feelings too much. You've a right to them.

only way we can defend the rights and interests of the majority against the greed, arrogance, waste and incompetence of the small ruling elite of politicians, bureaucrats, business bosses and bankers is by active campaigning and by using their laws against them. It will be interesting to see whether we can ever successfully fight back to defend our interests against the rapacious, self-serving, new ruling caste.

We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

Let me say with a Georgia accent that we cannot solve this problem if it requires a diplomatic passport to claim the rights of an American citizen.

Without the rule of law there could be no safety and no progress: if you created something, somebody else might just take it away because they wanted it.

James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and 'if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or "destroyed" like savage beasts.

Insofar as we have freedoms, it's not because some great wise Founding Fathers granted them to us. It's because people like us insisted on exercising those freedoms—by doing exactly what we're doing here—before anyone was willing to acknowledge that they had them.

The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have 'naturally', even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws?

Kandiaronk] swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

The burden of rights-scolding falls above all on the younger generations. In most wealthy countries, the current crop of people in their twenties represents the first generation in more than a century that can, on the whole, expect opportunities and living standards substantially worse than those enjoyed by their parents. Yet at the same time, they are lectured relentlessly from both left and right on their sense of entitlement for feeling they might deserve anything else.

Those who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them.

one man's right is simply another's obligation.

The job of the union, he insisted, could be reduced to a simple idea: the protection of the slowest and least efficient worker.

Yes, indeed, individual laborers will have rights over their own body and individual legal rights in the labor market. In principle they have the right to sell their labor-power to whomsoever they choose and the right to buy whatever they want in the marketplace with the wages they receive. Creating such a world is what the capitalist form of imperial politics has been about for the past two hundred years.

Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.

L]iberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence...

De la ley nace la seguridad; de la seguridad, la curiosidad, y de la curiosidad, el saber. (...) En la necesaria marcha de las cosas, el derecho debe preceder a la ciencia

There are many ways to honor America. This book is mine. I have completed this journey of self-education in the belief that the most terrifying possibility since 9/11 has not been terrorism--as frightening as that is--but the prospect that Americans will give up their rights in pursuing the chimera of security.