Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Howard Taft

Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority.

William Blackstone

The third absolute right, inherent in every Englishman, is that of . . . the sacred and inviolable rights of private property.

William Blackstone

The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We are now Courts of equity, and must decide the thing according to all the rights.

Samuel Gompers

In many instances the conduct of colored workmen, and those who have spoken for them, has not been in asking or demanding that equal rights be accorded to them as to white workmen, but somehow conveying the idea that they are to be petted and coddled and given special consideration and special privilege. Of course that can't be done.

Samuel Gompers

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

Ward Churchill

I hear Republicans and Libertarians and so forth talking about property rights, but they stop talking about property rights as soon as the subject of American Indians comes up, because they know fully well, perhaps not in a fully articulated, conscious form, but they know fully well that the basis for the very system of endeavor and enterprise and profitability to which they are committed and devoted accrues on the basis of theft of the resources of someone else. They are in possession of stolen property. They know it. They all know it. It's a dishonest endeavor from day one.

Van Jones

The end of the occupation. The right of return of the Palestinian people. These are critical dividing lines in human rights. We have to be here. No American would put up with an Israeli-style occupation of their hometown for 53 days let alone 54 years. U.S. tax dollars are funding violence against people of color inside the U.S. borders and outside the U.S. borders.

William Greider

Everyone cares for disabled people, right? What they don't care for are genuine civil rights for disabled people. MARY JOHNSON tells the tortuous, enraging story of how Congress enacted a law that instead of protecting against discrimination has turned 'the disabled' into a political punching bag.

William Greider

If one benefits tangibly from the exploitation of others who are weak, is one morally implicated in their predicament? Or are basic rights of human existence confined to the civilized societies that are wealthy enough to afford them? Our values are defined by what we will tolerate when it is done to others.

Tim Berners-Lee

As more and more people awaken to the threats against our basic rights online, we must start a debate - everywhere - about the web we want.

Thomas Jefferson

The oppressed should rebel, and they will continue to rebel and raise disturbance until their civil rights are fully restored to them and all partial distinctions, exlusions, and incapacitations are removed.

Thomas Jefferson

That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

Thomas Jefferson

The people, especially when moderately instructed, are the only safe, because the only honest, depositaries of the public rights, and should therefore be introduced into the administration of them in every function to which they are sufficient; they will err sometimes and accidentally, but never designedly, and with a systematic and persevering purpose of overthrowing the free principles of the government.

Thomas Jefferson

The mass of the citizens is the safest depositary of their own rights.

Thomas Jefferson

Circumstances sometimes require, that rights the most unquestionable should be advanced with delicacy.

Thomas Jefferson

Some other natural rights... [have] not yet entered into any declaration of rights.

Thomas Jefferson

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Thomas Jefferson

Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established.

Thomas Jefferson

But whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re- establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.

Thomas Frank

There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word 'freedom' that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.

Victoria Woodhull

I boldly entered the arena of business and exercised the rights I already possessed.

Gerrit Smith

To no human charter am I indebted for my rights.

Herman Cain

The Democrats co-opted the credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But if you go back and look at the history, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for that than did Democrats. But a Democrat president signed it, so they co-opted credit for having passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Herbert Spencer

However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.

Herb Kohl

The judicial branch has, in its finest hours, stood firmly on the side of individuals against those who would trample their rights.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The social compact sets up among the citizens as equality of such kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all enjoy the same rights.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.

Jeremy Corbyn

If every human rights atrocity is described as a Holocaust,[Adolf] Hitler's attempted obliteration of the Jewish people is diminished or de-recognised in our history.

Jeremy Corbyn

Other human rights atrocities from African slavery to the killing fields of Cambodia, the Armenian and Rwandan Genocides are all of course to be remembered, but diluting their particularity or comparing degrees of evil does no good.

Jesse Owens

We must respect the rights and properties of our fellowman. And then learn to play the game of life, as well as the game of athletics, according to the rules of society. If you can take that and put it into practice in the community in which you live, then, to me you have won the greatest championship.

Jeffrey Rosen

For [Louis] Brandeis, it's not a technical question of channeling what would James Madison say. It's how do we take these inherent human natural rights of liberty and translate them into an age of new technolog

Jeffrey Sachs

We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy.