Quotes About Rights

Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite powers.

For it is an observation, as true as it is trite, that there is nothing men differ so readily about as the payment of money. Laws in violation of private contracts, as they amount to aggressions on the rights of those States whose citizens are injured by them, may be considered as another probable source of hostility.

having one, it would not have been amiss here. A people, entering into society, surrender such a part of their natural rights, as shall be necessary for the existence of that society. They

For it is a truth, which the experience of ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.

but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.

To comprehend...the full sanctity, the full breadth and reality of the individual's rights and not to destroy society, not to shatter it into atoms, is the most difficult of tasks. It has never been resolved by any historical systems in the past; for that one needs a great maturity, which mankind has not yet attained.

The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop.

Often you told me that responsibility and authority are privileges, not the rights of every man for the taking.

there is very little connection between law and justice.

As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren't culturally distinct anymore. Then we're part of someone else's corporate plan, we're a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we're a black dot on a bottom line.

Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.

It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.

Si aujourd'hui comme hier, la condition humaine, parce que trop éthérée, ne suffit pas à garantir le droit de survivre, peut-être la condition exilique, qui quoique mobile garde pour ainsi dire les pieds sur terre, le permettra-t-elle. Encore faut-il en admettre l'existence. (p. 17)

Individuals with a pathological power-drive seek to secure their position in life with extraordinary efforts, with exceptional haste and impatience, with violent impulses, and all without the slightest consideration for others. These are the children whose behaviour is characterized by their frantic strivings towards an exaggerated goal of dominance. Their attacks on the rights of others in turn put their own rights at risk; they are against the world and the world is therefore against them.

It is the right of our people to organize to oppose any law and any part of the Constitution with which they are not in sympathy.

I own guns because it's my right, it's my Second Amendment right, and no one in Washington gave me that right; it's a natural right confirmed by the very people that founded this nation.

Conservative and Labour governments have arguably championed British rights in Brussels so ostentatiously in order to deflect public attention away from their deference to Washington.

I had been involved in the March on Washington in 1963. I was with friends carrying a sign, 'Protestants, Jews and Catholics for Civil Rights.'

There still is a war on women in terms of politicians in Washington and the state legislatures trying to eliminate any rights we have fought to win and that the Supreme Court has afforded us.

I really think that people's right to happiness shouldn't be dictated by some policymaker in Washington, D.C. I've come to know a lot of people that - sexual orientation is such where they're in love with people from the same sex, and I just don't think it's our role in the government to say, 'No you can't be married.'

When you represent the state of Washington, we have a tradition of deciding social issues by vote. Washington State passed abortion rights before Roe v. Wade and affirmed it at the ballot box later.