Famous Quotes & Sayings

Helen Thomas

Maybe the Jefferson case will give members of Congress second thoughts the next time they get ready to legislate away the rights of ordinary Americans.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them well.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it.

Joe Lhota

I still am a virulent anti-communist. It is a bad system, an immoral system, and one that takes away the rights of people and the rights of individuals. And everywhere it's gone, it's failed.

Eric Liu

Conservatives forget that citizenship is more than a thing to withhold from immigrants. Progressives forget it's more than a set of rights.

Emma Thompson

If you don't want women to do whatever they need to do then you must provide them with food, you must provide them with shelter and their basic human rights.

Emma Goldman

True, the movement for women's rights has broken many old fetters, but it has also forged new ones.

John McCain

There is always an element of realpolitik that has to be present in the conduct of any nation's national security affairs. At the same time, we have to also have a balance between realpolitik and Wilsonian principles of freedom and democracy and human rights. And maintaining that balance is the greatest challenge that we in the West, including the Federal Republic of Germany, have to face because it's many times a very difficult decision-making process.

John McCain

And we are in a strange conundrum. You can kill an American citizen overseas. But according to this administration, if you capture him in the United States, they've got to be read their Miranda rights.

John Jay Chapman

Attack another's rights and you destroy your own.

John Hume

The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about

Ayn Rand

Whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all.

Ayn Rand

The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill.

Ayn Rand

There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights.

Ayn Rand

Any group or "collective," large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the "rights" of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights.

Ayn Rand

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept 'just a few controls' is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States.

Ayn Rand

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

Ayn Rand

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights...

Ayn Rand

One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living.

Ayn Rand

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

Ayn Rand

Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.

Ayn Rand

America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more-and nothing less. The rest-everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything 'noble and just,' and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history-was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.

Ayn Rand

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.

Ayn Rand

America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.

Benjamin Disraeli

Popular privileges are consistent with a state of society in which there is great inequality of position. Democratic rights, on the contrary, demand that there should be equality of condition as the fundamental basis of the society they regulate.

Eldridge Cleaver

I've gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.

Eleanor Roosevelt

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights...

Eleanor Roosevelt

It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded.

Eleanor Roosevelt

A respect for the rights of other peoples to determine their forms of government and their economy will not weaken our democracy. It will inevitably strengthen it.

Eleanor Roosevelt

We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind, that is the approval by the General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

encroaching on citizens' rights and worsening the situation.

Our thinking was that all of these rights had been secured.