Famous Quotes & Sayings

Paulo Coelho

Many times the wrong train took me to the right place.

Questlove

I was born at a very crucial time. I consider 1968 to be the Mason Dixon line between pre- and post-civil rights generation ideas, whereas a lot of people born before '68 they kind of went into that Moses mentality. Like, I'm not going to make it, you know, I don't have any hope.

Polybius

Nor ought we ever to allow any growing power to acquire such a degree of strength as to be able to tear from us, without resistance, our natural, undisputed rights.

Richard Bach

We don't have rights until we claim them.

Robert Frost

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Thomas Paine

The Bill of Rights should contain the general principles of natural and civil liberty. It should be to a community what the eternal laws and obligations of morality are to the conscience. It should be unalterable by any human power ...

Thomas Paine

The right of voting for representatives , is the primary right by which other rights are protected.

Thomas Hutchinson

[The] prevailing reason at this time is, that the Act of Parliament is against the Magna Charta, and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.

Thomas Sowell

Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.

Thomas Sowell

Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own rights in jeopardy - quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody's rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can't tell the water where to go.

Thomas Sowell

For society as a whole, nothing comes as a "right" to which we are "entitled." Even bare subsistence has to be produced-and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history. The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.

Robert Kennedy

In my judgment, the slogan "black power" and what has been associated with it has set the civil rights movement back considerably in the United States over the period of the last several months.

Sandra Fluke

In the last two years, the amount of legislation in the House of Representatives and state legislatures has been really unprecedented, that has focused on reproductive rights.

Sandra Day O'Connor

I sort of thought the framers of the Constitution were talking about the rights of individuals, not corporate entities.

Ronnie Musgrove

Like a majority of Americans in recent years, I came to understand that fear of homosexuality was leading our governments ... to deny the equal rights to an entire segment of our population that are afforded all of us under the Constitution.

Rory Bremner

When you consider what Tony Blair was saying about liberty, human rights and that sort of thing, it would be terribly revolutionary to sell the speeches he and Jack Straw made in 1994.

Roger Wicker

Civil libertarians have raised concerns that some of the Patriot Act's provisions infringe on Constitutional rights. Those concerns are not supported by the facts.

Roger Waters

The United States has held out against taking part in any of the world consensus that there should be a court of human rights or that there should be an international court of criminal justice.

Roger Ebert

If your religion doesn't respect the rights of other religions, it is lacking something.

Robin Roberts

I have never been happier, or healthier, than I am right now.

Robert Toombs

We have not sought this conflict; we have sought too long to avoid it; our forbearance has been construed into weakness, our magnanimity into fear, until the vindication of our manhood, as well as the defence of our rights, is required at our hands.

Sandra Postel

We have been quick to assume rights to use water but slow to recognize obligations to preserve and protect it... In short, we need a water ethic-a guide to right conduct in the face of complex decisions about natural systems we do not and cannot fully understand.

Richard M. Nixon

It's long been common practice among many to draw a distinction between "human rights" and "property rights," suggesting that the two are separate and unequal - with "property rights" second to "human rights."

Richard Ford

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.

Robert Dale Owen

And I hereby distinctly and emphatically declare that I consider myself, and earnestly desire to be considered by others, as utterly divested, now and during the rest of my life, of any such rights, the barbarous relics of a feudal, despotic system.

Roald Dahl

Two rights don't equal a left.

Richard Cobden

the twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen, and who are mystified into the notion that they are not political bondmen, by that great juggle of the ' English Constitution ' a thing of monopolies, and Church-craft, and sinecures, armorial hocus-pocus, primogeniture, and pageantry!

Trevor Phillips

Human rights are not worthy of the name if they do not protect the people we don't like as well as those we do.

Valerie Jarrett

The ADA was a landmark civil rights legislation. It was a bill of rights for persons with disabilities, a formal acknowledgement that Americans with disabilities are Americans first and that they're entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else.

Rudy Giuliani

We should be tolerant, fair, open, and we should understand the rights that all people have in our society

Samuel Johnson

If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

Sam Brownback

We must take proactive steps to promote democracy and human rights abroad.

Saddam Hussein

During the rule of the Shah, arrogance, aggression, territorial expansion at the expense of the Arabs and attempts to harm Iraq's national sovereignty and the rights of the Arab nation were a constant pattern. Iraq and the Arab nation were regarded as a sphere of influence for the expansionist plans of Iranian interests. That policy has been followed throughout history by the State of Persia against its neighbours to the west, and as we have shown.