Famous Quotes & Sayings

Irene Khan

Racism is an attack on the very notion of the universality of human rights. It systematically denies certain people the enjoyment of their full human rights because of their colour, race, ethnicity, descent or national origin.

Immanuel Kant

Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a conditional, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence.

Immanuel Kant

Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace.

Elton John

You get the same equal rights that we do when we have a civil partnership. Heterosexual people get married. We can have civil partnerships.

Ellen DeGeneres

I would love to have the same rights as everybody else. I would love, I don't care if it's called marriage. I don't care if it's called, you know, domestic partnership. I don't care what it's called.

Georges Bernanos

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Jefferson Davis

How idle is this prating about natural rights as though still containing all that had been forfeited.

Jean Racine

Small crimes always precede great crimes. Whoever has been able to transgress the limits set by law may afterwards violate the most sacred rights; crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness.

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.

Christopher Hitchens

You can't have occupation and human rights.

Christopher Hitchens

[Concerning monotheistic religions] The only thing these hysterical cults have in common is the belief that this world will be consumed, and deservedly so, when the moment is ripe. They also, all of them, profess a great disdain for earthly possessions. Yet they pass the intervening time in haggling over the most trivial and paltry property rights, over caves and rocks and disputable pieces of archeological rubbish.

Christopher Dodd

When the public's right to know is threatened, all other public rights are threatened.

Christopher Dodd

When the public's right to know is threatened, and when the rights of free speech and free press are at risk, all of the other liberties we hold dear are endangered.

Frances Wright

There is but one honest limit to the rights of a sentient being; it is where they touch the rights of another sentient being.

Frances Wright

Equality! Where is it, if not in education? Equal rights! They cannot exist without equality of instruction.

Floyd Abrams

It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on.

George W. Romney

The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others. Neither can we permit states' rights at the expense of human rights.

George Washington

The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.

George Washington

Freedom and Property Rights are inseparable. You can't have one without the other.

George Washington

Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people. The general government . . . can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any despotic or oppresive form so long as there is any virtue in the body of the people.

George Washington

Happy, thrice happy shall they be pronounced hereafter, who have contributed any thing, who have performed the meanest office in erecting this stupendous fabrick of Freedom and Empire on the broad basis of Independency; who have assisted in protecting the rights of humane nature and establishing an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions.

George Nethercutt

If succeeding generations of Americans don't understand the concepts of justice, individual rights, free enterprise, capitalism, sovereignty or national security, there can be no guarantee that those concepts - or others like them - will continue.

Friedrich Nietzsche

no one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any

Friedrich Nietzsche

This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights.

Franz Grillparzer

Right and proof are two crutches for everything bent and crooked that limps along.

Franz Grillparzer

Finally and long overdue, your people, oppressed and disgraced by hatred and maliciousness, have achieved justice: now you enjoy full citizen's rights, but you'll remain Jews nonetheless.

Jim Costa

The civil rights movement would experience many important victories, but Rosa Parks will always be remembered as its catalyst.

George W. Bush

No President has ever done more for human rights than I have.

George W. Bush

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights... stands as a landmark achievement in the history of human liberty.

George Soros

The US needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights. The revenues from these auctions can be used to launch a new, environmentally friendly energy policy. That would be yet another federal program that could help us to overcome the stagnation.

Frederick Douglass

I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.