Individual Rights Quotes

#1. The West has given us the liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction.

Ibn Warraq

#2. Capitalism is based on individual rights - not on the sacrifice of the individual to the 'public good' of the collective.

Ayn Rand

#3. I still totally believe in individual rights and individual responsibility and in choosing to do good.

Neil Peart

#4. It should go without saying that even the most narrowly construed eminent-domain power would violate individual rights. Either a person owns his legitimately acquired property or he does not.

Sheldon Richman

#5. Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.

A.E. Samaan

#6. Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.

Larry Flynt

#7. We need to insist on fathers and mothers sharing the care of their offspring as well as the opportunity to enjoy the fulfillment of individual rights.

Mary Frances Berry

#8. Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers.

John Ashcroft

#9. I think it is very important for any U.S. administration to be clear that America stands on the side of freedom and democracy and respect for individual rights.

Stephen Hadley

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

Calvin Coolidge

#11. I think liberals have to come to terms with the market and embrace market mechanisms as the only way to run a society that produces widespread material well-being and respects individual rights and liberties.

Douglas Massey

#12. We talk about democracy as if it's a safeguard for individual rights ... Instead, it's become our way of intruding on rights, allegedly in the name of that most collectivist of concepts: The Common Good.

Jonathan D. Morris

#13. Individual rights always go along with the interests of the society. I want to add that in Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.

Nong Duc Manh

#14. Legally speaking, there are no such things as 'public rights,' as distinguished from individual rights. Legally speaking, there is no such creature or thing as 'the public.'

Lysander Spooner

#15. Freedom, liberty, individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them, is critical to me.

Jimmy Wales

#16. The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny.

Gerry Spence

#17. I believe in individual rights so much that I don't like any sort of 'what's good for the cause'-type questions.

Penn Jillette

#18. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.

Penn Jillette

#19. A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.

Matthew Woodring Stover

#20. The government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.

Antonin Scalia

#21. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.

Ayn Rand

#22. My office has been one of the most scrupulous in the country with regard to the protection of individual rights. I've been on record for years in law journals and books as championing the rights of the individual against the oppressive power of the state.

Jim Garrison

#23. One thing I fear, that you Americans will do the same thing that you did after the last war. I mean that you will pull out of here and leave Europe, then Russia will have her way. Private enterprise and individual rights will be lost just as much as under a Nazi government. Frightful!

Hjalmar Schacht

#24. 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

#25. 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.

Judy Woodruff

#26. The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.

Ron Paul

#27. America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.

Ayn Rand

#28. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Ayn Rand

#29. The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.

Anna Pavlova

#30. But what I believe is that if a person's individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don't issue mandates to businesses that you've got to do this and you've got to do that.

Clarence Thomas

#31. As far as the earth is from the stars, and fire from the sea, so is the useful from the right. Power over men perishes completely if justice begins to be observed, and respect for individual rights overcomes strongholds.

Lucan

#32. A basic component of individual rights is the right to own property.

Russell Shorto

#33. Angela Davis's legacy as a freedom fighter made her an enemy of the state under the increasingly neoliberal regimes of Nixon, Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover because she understood that the struggle for freedom was not only a struggle for political and individual rights but also for economic rights.

Henry Giroux

#34. A privileging of individual rights over group goods can lead to serious problems, as we've seen with the antivaccination movement.

Emily Matchar

#35. Striking a balance in favor of individual rights has always been the right decision for us and that it remains so even when technology gives us new ways to exercise those rights. Individual liberty has never weakened us; freedom of speech, enhanced by the Net, will only make us stronger.

Mike Godwin

#36. Legally speaking, the term 'public rights' is as vague and indefinite as are the terms 'public health,' 'public good,' 'public welfare,' and the like. It has no legal meaning, except when used to describe the separate, private, individual rights of a greater or less number of individuals.

Lysander Spooner

#37. Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society.

Lawrence Kohlberg

#38. The political Right likes to champion individual rights and individual liberty, but it has also worked to enforce morality in relation to abortion, gambling, and homosexuality.

Dave Brat

#39. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote. A majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority. The political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities, and the smallest minority on earth is the individual.

Ayn Rand

#40. Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned

Ayn Rand

#41. We talk a lot about individual rights, but in fact Americans are very willing to give up our individual rights if it means our property values will be protected, and so on.

Robert D. Kaplan

#42. We must look to an open, tolerant, inclusive England, which embraces the values of a Britain that still leads the world in terms of an open democracy, as well as an understanding of the needs for responsibilities and obligations to run alongside the affirmation of individual rights.

David Blunkett

#43. Say what you will about Americans, but one thing they are not is passive. The Bush administration may have pushed through the Patriot Act weeks after 11 September, but, as the American public got to grips with how the law was affecting their individual rights, their protests grew loud and angry.

Heather Brooke

#44. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights a government is men's deadliest enemy.

Ayn Rand

#45. Any successful nominee should possess both the temperament to interpret the law and the wisdom to do so fairly. The next Supreme Court Justice should have a record of protecting individual rights and a strong willingness to put aside any political agenda.

Bennie Thompson

#46. 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.

George Nethercutt

#47. China has no choice but to emulate the power of America's founding ideas and its journey through the universal values of democratic freedom and individual rights.

Patrick Mendis

#48. The platform we had in Dallas, the 1984 Republican platform, all the ideas we supported there - from tax policy, to foreign policy; from individual rights, to neighborhood security - are things that Jefferson Davis and his people believed in.

Trent Lott

#49. In going too far, they [presidents] have taken away the individual rights of American citizens.

Dick Durbin

#50. Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression "individual rights"? is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression "collective rights"? is a contradiction in terms.

Ayn Rand

#51. The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.

Steven Pinker

#52. The duties are even more important than the rights; and in the long run I think that the reward is ampler and greater for duty well done, than for the insistence upon individual rights.

Theodore Roosevelt

#53. The one thing man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by a World Government, a New World Order.

Henry A. Kissinger

#54. The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today.

Thurgood Marshall

#55. There is really only one proper function: the protection of individual rights.

Ayn Rand

#56. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

Ayn Rand

#57. If the entire society was conscious of its duties, nobody would need to fight for their individual rights. Since everybodys's rights would be automatically taken care of through someone else's duties.

Amish Tripathi

#58. If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.

B.F. Skinner

#59. It's a hard thing to legislate. You can't legislate good taste and you can't put a number on it in terms of square footage. It's a question of where individual rights end and community rights begin.

Ann Robinson

#60. Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: "I'll do as I please at everybody else's expense." An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man - his own and those of others.

Ayn Rand

#61. I do believe that it was through divine providence that the Founding Fathers drafted a document that created a government that didn't trust each other - hence the separation of powers. And then, to close the deal, the Bill of Rights was added to continue to protect individual rights and freedoms.

John Shimkus

#62. Those Russkies won't put up with your whining and bellyaching for one second. I believe in freedom and individual rights as well as the next man but nobody has the right to live here and do nothing but run us down.

Fannie Flagg

#63. I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.

Clarence Thomas

#64. I'm concerned about the role the court will play in protecting individual rights in this and the next century.

Dianne Feinstein

#65. Our funding is based on our support of ideas like limited government, individual rights and a strong defense.

Richard Scaife

#66. The simple truth hit Shiva: if the entire society was conscious of its duties, nobody would need to fight for their individual rights. Since everybody's rights would be automatically taken care of through someone else's duties. Lord Ram was a genius!

Amish Tripathi

#67. While new rights are attributed to or indeed almost presumed by the individual, life is not always protected as the primary value and the primordial right of every human being. The ultimate aim of medicine remains the defence and promotion of life.

Pope Francis

#68. I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.

A.E. Samaan

#69. Our goals can only be achieved with a society that respects and equally protects the rights of every human being, old and young, rich and poor, regardless of gender, color, race, or creed. We must reject the initiation of violence by individuals or government as morally repugnant.

Ron Paul

#70. [In government] the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other-that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.

James Madison

#71. Natural rights are those which always appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the rights of others.

Thomas Paine

#72. Despots are elected and deposed.
Laws are passed and repealed.
Nations rise and fall.
Individual liberty is eternal.

A.E. Samaan

#73. ... gay marriage rights coming and going, always being an issue for the voting public when it should be an individual's private choice.

G.A. Hauser

#74. Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

Ayn Rand

#75. Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.

A.E. Samaan

#76. The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.

Wyndham Lewis

#77. Historically, the court has been the forum to which individuals can turn when they believed their constitutional rights were violated. This has been especially noteworthy in the arena of civil rights.

Dianne Feinstein

#78. America is very much about individual happiness, the right to expression, self-determination. In America you do need to point to harm befalls victims before you can limit someone else's rights.

Jonathan Haidt

#79. We took the name 'Liberal' because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea.

Robert Menzies

#80. As the guardian of our rights, the Supreme Court makes decisions every year which either protect the individual or leave him at the mercy of more powerful forces in our society.

Herb Kohl

#81. We don't need a weakened government but a strong government that would take responsibility for the rights of the individual and care for the society as a whole.

Vladimir Putin

#82. We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.

Rand Paul

#83. Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.

William Jennings Bryan

#84. Coercive redistribution of wealth through government's abuse of law and misapplication of rights destroys individual liberty; ambition, productivity, and wealth; and the purpose of the commonwealth.

Mark R. Levin

#85. The protection of human rights to promote the dignity of the individual is too important a matter for symbolic gestures alone. It is only through the pursuit of practical and effective efforts to promote human rights that we show our real commitment to the welfare of individuals and society.

Alexander Downer

#86. Law is often the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

Thomas Jefferson

#87. The rights of the individual should be the primary object of all governments.

Mercy Otis Warren

#88. The Constitution was the expression not only of a political faith, but also of political fears. It was wrought both as the organ of the national interest and as the bulwark of certain individual and local rights.

Herbert Croly

#89. Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self preservation? (CIA Document, Project ARTICHOKE, MORI ID 144686, 1952)
As cited by Dr Ellen P. Lacter, p57

Orit Badouk Epstein

#90. Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Thomas Jefferson

#91. When human rights are systematically abused, it raises the question whether it may be legitimate in some circumstances for the international community to intervene within individual states as well as in conflicts between states.

Charles Kennedy

#92. The duties I ask of myself are obligatory for absolutely every individual, everywhere. Moreover, just as I recognize these rights and duties of others, I would like the others to recognize them form me as well.

Ameen Rihani

#93. In America there are none poor, and none even that can be called peasants. Each citizen has some property, and all citizens have the same rights as the richest individual, or landed proprietor, in the country.

Marquis De Lafayette

#94. The emblem of equal rights. It means free hands, free lips, self- government, and the sovereignty of the individual.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#95. Without a criterion enabling us to distinguish genuine human rights from the many impostors we will never be sure that our legal provisions, however wise, benevolent and responsible, will be secure against the individual desire to escape from them.

Roger Scruton

#96. Most gun control arguments miss the point. If all control boils fundamentally to force, how can one resist aggression without equal force? How can a truly "free" state exist if the individual citizen is enslaved to the forceful will of individual or organized aggressors? It cannot.

Tiffany Madison

#97. I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#98. The idea of legally establishing inalienable, inherent and sacred rights of the individual is not of political but religious origin.

George Jellinek

#99. We are a nation of immigrants, a quilt of many colors, and we've managed over more than two centuries to create a way of life that allows for a reasonable degree of upward mobility, that prizes individual liberty, promotes freedom of religion and genuinely values equal rights for all citizens.

Jay Parini

#100. By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality.

Mary Midgley