Famous Quotes & Sayings

Abraham Lincoln

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

Alexander Hamilton

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?

Thomas Fuller

It is more difficult to praise rightly than to blame.

I think that our statute on grandparents' rights is more tailored, more limited, and doesn't usurp parents' rights.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I have no doubt that there will continue to be bumps, some serious crises indeed in our relationship with China.... Neither membership in the WTO nor normalized trade relations with the United States will magically impose the rule of law on China or institute deep-seeded respect for human rights. But it certainly has potential to advance those purposes.

Cornel West

Frederick Douglas's agenda was an agenda, not for black people to get out of slavery. It was for America to become a better democracy. And it's spilt over for women's rights; it's split over for worker's rights and so forth.

Cornel West

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102)

Cliff Stearns

First, the firearms industry has been around and has been respected for generations. They provide a valuable service and a highly desirable product to millions of sportsmen and supporters of those second amendment rights.

Dolores Huerta

Respecting other people’s rights is peace.

The true republic: men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.

There are inalienable obligations as well as inalienable rights

We don't own the syndication rights to the ACC.

F. Lee Bailey

Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee.

Vandana Shiva

One of the movements we have developed is to say that, just as intellectual property rights protect the inventions of individuals, common rights are needed to protect the common intellectual heritage of indigenous peoples. These are rights that are recognized through the Convention on Biological Diversity. We are working to make sure that they become foundations of our jurisprudence.

Vandana Shiva

Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature's gift and denies the poor of their human rights.

Vandana Shiva

We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.

David Boaz

Each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.

David Barton

Only majorities can expand political rights in America's constitutional society.

Daisaku Ikeda

The effects of human rights education can be dramatic in awakening people to the value and power of their own lives, as shown in the following stories.

Clarence Thomas

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

Clarence Thomas

A theory deeply etched in our law [is that] a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand.

Dan Rather

One finds oneself saying: 'I know the right question, but ... this is not exactly the right time to ask it.'

Dan Quayle

We expect them [Salvadoran officials] to work toward the elimination of human rights.

Truth can not be suppressed and always is the ultimate victor. So, we should tread on the righteous path.

Ludwig von Mises

The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights... Nothing, however, is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.

Ludwig von Mises

As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug.

Muhammad Yunus

We have a list of human rights - right to food, right to shelter, right to health, right to education, many such items which are considered and accepted as bill of rights. These are to be insured to people. So all nations, all societies try to do that.

Albert J. Nock

The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

Albert Camus

Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.

Albert Camus

Suffering gives us no special rights.

Annie Lennox

Those in the developing world have so few rights - we take a lot for granted in the developed world.

Annie Lennox

I stand on the shoulders of giants that have gone before me, in terms of affording people like myself, women, the access to democracy, the vote, medical treatment, education, everything that I've been given. It's all been earned. Therefore I feel it's incumbent on me personally to just contribute something, to add to a collective voice that needs to be here right now, to build it up to a tipping point, to make the world aware that women's rights still have to be addressed and that the word 'feminism' has been devalued and needs to be reclaimed.