Famous Quotes & Sayings

Lawrence Wright

When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.

John Keats

I scarcely remember counting upon happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.

Ouida

Woman already controls by not seeming to do so. Talk no more of her rights.

Kathryn Stockett

....we ain't doing civil rights here. We just telling stories like they really happen.

Judy Woodruff

He was a lifelong Republican, but over the years, Harry Blackmun built a reputation as a liberal, sometimes defiant Justice, whose fierce protection of individual rights led some to anoint him the moral conscience of the court.

Paul Kagame

Human rights groups are locked in a fierce competition for big checks from wealthy donors and they need to generate big headlines.

Mark Steyn

The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.

Nicole Kidman

Violence against women is an appalling human rights violation. But it is not inevitable. We can put a stop to this.

Nick Lampson

Moreover, as we live in an era of the ascendancy of democracy and human rights, we must see that Taiwan has been a vibrant democracy with a democratically elected president and legislature.

Paul Farmer

The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.

Paul Farmer

The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.

Martha Griffiths

All I want to be is human and American and have all the same rights and I will shut up.

Paul Ryan

In a justly organized community, however, government exists to secure the right to life and the other human rights that follow from that primary right.

Patrick Leahy

This is a time when the protections of Americans' liberties are directly at risk, as are the checks and balances that have served to constrain abuses of power for more than 200 years. The Supreme Court is relied upon by all of to us protect our fundamental rights.

Patrick Leahy

The rights of copyright holders need to be protected, but some draconian remedies that have been suggested would create more problems than they would solve.

Patrick Henry

It is when a people forget God, that tyrants forge their chains.

Joseph Sobran

The Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was meant to inhibit only the federal government, not the states. The framers, as The Federalist Papers attest (see No. 28), saw the state militias as forces that might be summoned into action against the federal government itself, if it became tyrannical.

Rachel Maddow

Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.

Noam Chomsky

There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them

Noam Chomsky

The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist." This is simply vulgar propaganda, like the term "anti-Soviet" used by the most disgusting commissars to refer to dissidents. It is not only vulgar, but idiotic.

Noam Chomsky

The term 'globalisation' is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.

Noam Chomsky

Terror became a big issue when the Reagan Administration came in. They immediately announced [their plans] and kind of disparaged Carter's alleged human rights programs. The main issue is state-directed international terrorism. Right at that time that big industry developed. That's when you start getting the academic departments on terrorism.

Noam Chomsky

The US and Israel have demanded further that Palestinians not only recognize Israel's rights as a state in the international system, but that they also recognize Israel's abstract right to exist, a concept that has no place in international law or diplomacy, and a right claimed by no one. In effect, the US and Israel are demanding that Palestinians . . . formally accept the legitimacy of their expulsion from their own land. They cannot be expected to accept that, just as Mexico does not grant the US the right to exist on half of Mexico's territory, gained by conquest.

John Ashcroft

[Ashcroft vowed to] spare no effort to preserve the rights of all our citizens to pledge allegiance to the American flag.

John Green

Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.

Mary Robinson

There's a worldwide linking of environmental activists, developmental experts and human rights advocates. And they're using the two frameworks, in particular environmental standards and human rights.

Mary Robinson

Climate change is the greatest threat to human rights in the 21st century.

Mary Robinson

Today's human rights violations are the causes of tomorrow's conflicts.

Mary Ritter Beard

In their (women) quest for rights they have naturally placed emphasis on their wrongs rather than their achievements and possessions, and have retold history as a story of their long martyrdom

Martin Farquhar Tupper

Law hath dominion over all things, over universal mind and matter; For there are reciprocities of rights, which no creature can gainsay.

Marquis de Lafayette

True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate.

Marquis de Lafayette

Insurrection is the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.

Mario Vargas Llosa

The foundations of liberty are private property and the rule of law; this system guarantees the fewest possible forms of injustice, produces the greatest material and cultural progress, most effectively stems violence and provides the greatest respect for human rights. According to this concept of liberalism, freedom is a single, unified concept. Political and economic liberties are as inseparable as the two sides of a medal.