Famous Quotes & Sayings

Benjamin Disraeli

Poverty has its duties as well as its rights.

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.

Calvin Coolidge

If the people lose control of the arteries of trade and the natural sources of mechanical power, the nationalization of all industry should soon be expected. Our forefathers were alert to resist all encroachments upon their rights. If we wish to maintain our rights, we can do no less.

Calvin Coolidge

One of the greatest perils to an extensive republic is the disregard of individual rights.

Calvin Coolidge

Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.

Busy Philipps

It's ludicrous that my friends in California aren't able to legally get married. It's a civil rights issue. In 20 years we're going to look back at tapes of these antigay people saying ridiculous things on the news and it's going to sound as antiquated as the newsreels of horrible racists from the '50s.

Carol Bellamy

And each of us can practice rights ourselves, treating each other without discrimination, respecting each other's dignity and rights.

Carol Bellamy

By ratifying the Convention, governments become legally bound to implement the rights therein.

Alan Keyes

You can't have it both ways. Either our rights come from God, as our Declaration of Independence says, or they come from human choice. If they come from human choice, then our whole way of life is meaningless, it has no foundation.

Alan Dershowitz

Individuals have the right to pick and choose which expressions to condemn, which to praise and which to say nothing about. Governments, however, must remain neutral as to the content of expression. And governments must protect the rights of all to express even the most despicable of views.

Alan Dershowitz

In today's distorted world of 'human rights,' truth takes a back seat to ideology, and false claims - especially those that 'support' radical ideologies - persist even after they have been exposed.

Alan Dershowitz

To ask about the 'source' of rights or morals assumes an erreous conclusion. To ask about the source of morals is to assume that such a source exists. As if it existed outside of human constructed systems. The 'source' is the human ability to learn from experience and to entrench rights in our laws and in our consciousness. Our rights come from our long history of wrongs.

Al Gini

Part of the true luxury of "earned laziness" are the braggin rights that come along with being purposefully and publicly lazy. It is a badge of distinction, an emblem of success, without having to say too much about it. It labels us, affords us kudos, and raises our profile in the "pecking order" of our fellow troglodytes. It says to others, "See, I've done so well that I can afford to do nothing at all whenever I so choose!

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

where no individual in a community is denied his rights, the mass are the more perfectly protected in theirs; for whenever any class is subject to fraud or injustice, it shows that the spirit of tyranny is at work, and no one can tell where or how or when the infection will spread ...

Elena Kagan

Law matters, because it keeps us safe, because it protects our most fundamental rights and freedoms, and because it is the foundation of our democracy.

Abraham Lincoln

Your rights end where my nose begins.

Bruce Willis

I always question whether it's the right time for anything I do.

Breyten Breytenbach

The predominant yardstick of your government is not human rights but national interests.

Argus Hamilton

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz accused Republicans of trying to make it a crime to be an illegal alien. Democrats see a conspiracy plot. First Republicans want to say that illegal aliens are illegal, next they're going to want to take away their voting rights.

Argus Hamilton

Sudan replaced the U.S. on the U.N. Human Rights Commission joining Syria, and Cuba. So now, the commission members have no interest in upholding the stated mission of the panel. It's just like the Senate Ethics Committee.

Archie Shepp

It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.

Augusto Pinochet

The only solution to the issue of human rights is oblivion.

Dean Rusk

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.

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.

Eduardo Galeano

Human rights pale beside the rights of machines. In more and more cities, especially in the great metropolises of the South, people have been banned. Automobiles usurp human space, poison the air, and frequently murder the interlopers who invade their conquered territory -and no one lifts a finger to stop them. Is there a difference between violence that kills by car and that which kills by knife or bullet?" (p.231)

Edward Abbey

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.

Now being upon the haunches (as he necessarily must be in this case) is it impossible but he must be light in hand, because no horse can be rightly upon his haunches without being so.

Elizabeth Warren

America's middle class is getting hammered, and Washington is rigged to work for the big guy.