Our Rights Quotes

#1. Marching with over a million women in support of our reproductive rights was one of the most empowering things I have done, both as a woman and as a Member of Congress.

Sheila Jackson Lee

#2. The bottom line is that we cannot sit idle as unparalleled rules and regulations significantly restrict our rights and ability to care for our families.

Alan Wilson

#3. And therefore, for the sake of my mater, without any regard for my own, I hope all those that have a due regard for our constitution and for the rights and prerogatives of the crown, without which our constitution can not be preserved, will be against this motion.

Robert Walpole

#4. There is nobody that I know who believes that Bank of America is a human being who should be entitled for the same constitutional rights that the people of our country are.

Bernie Sanders

#5. The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.

George Washington

#6. 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

#7. Everyone should feel comfortable they are going to remain in their homes until their dying days. We should never be uneasy or unsure of where our home is in the United States of America.

Tit Elingtin

#8. Until we align our minds with our souls,
we will continue to grieve for our highest selves as individuals, a society, and as a world family.

Leta B.

#9. It's going to be very important that we as women's rights advocates are involved in redistricting of both the states legislatures and of the House of Representatives and that we not lose seats but we gain seats for talented women and our country, but we're lacking behind.

Eleanor Smeal

#10. Unfortunately, we don't have the option of marriage in our country. We could go to Britain or Spain or Argentina and do something symbolic, but that's not what I want. I want to have the rights of anybody else in my home country. I don't want to be a second-class citizen

Dick Cheney

#11. Craster is his own man. He has sworn us no vows. Nor is he subject to our laws. Your heart is noble, Jon, but learn a lesson here. We cannot set the world to rights. That is not our purpose. The Night's Watch has other wars to fight.

George R R Martin

#12. Once we take our eyes away from ourselves, from our interests, from our own rights, privileges, ambitions - then they will become clear to see Jesus around us.

Mother Teresa

#13. When shallow critics denounce the profit motive inherent in our system of private enterprise, they ignore the fact that it is an economic support of every human right we possess and without it, all rights would disappear.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#14. Eritrean people are strong and caring. And despite all that we had been through we were brimming with optimism. Our country was on the verge of huge change.

Abeba Habtu

#15. The purpose of the word "slut" is: controlling women through shame and humiliation. Women's bodies are always the ones that are being vied over for control - whether it's rape, reproductive rights, or violence against women, it's our bodies that are the battleground, not men's.

Jessica Valenti

#16. I think that, as Americans, we should never forget that when we tamper with freedom of speech, it is a very sensitive issue that affects all of our constitutional rights and privileges.

Charles B. Rangel

#17. Our men and women fighting in Iraq are held accountable for their performance and their conduct. On duty and off, twenty-four hours a day. They're fighting for us, for our safety, our rights, and our freedoms.

Wesley Clark

#18. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Edward Snowden

#19. First, we could have defied both of them and could have gone to war against both of these nations for this violation of international law and interference with our neutral rights.

George William Norris

#20. Our recent history should have made one thing clear. Women's rights are human rights. Any foreign policy that fails to recognize this effectively dehumanizes half the human race.

Jack Holland

#21. When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them.

Helen Keller

#22. We live in a day and time when our rights sometimes take precedence over our pursuit of righteousness, when we get caught in the rush of seeking self rather than seeking God.

Lysa TerKeurst

#23. As a so-called "civilized" people, and as members of a society in search of lasting peace in the world, we cannot remain callous to our responsibility toward nature and insensitive to the inherent rights of the animals.

Nathaniel Altman

#24. 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.

Jeffrey Sachs

#25. Today neither of our two parties maintains a meaningful commitment to the principle of States' Rights. The 10th Amendment is not a 'general assumption' but a rule of law. States rights mean that states have a right to act or not to act, as they see fit, in areas reserved to them.

Barry Goldwater

#26. I'm really proud that the LGBT community has gotten behind me because, as I said, I am part of the community, so I do as much as I possibly can for our community and for our rights, so it's nice that everyone is supporting me as well.

Tabatha Coffey

#27. I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

Sara Sheridan

#28. The Roman Empire, born out the Roman Republic, with its ideas of democracy among a certain group of wealthy men (no vote for men without land -as with our Founding Fathers- and certainly no vote for women and slaves. Why are democracies built on top of one form of slavery or another?)

Tina Packer

#29. The Second Amendment, like all of our rights, is reliant on a moral and virtuous people. Without that, nothing else matters. Man can not rule himself if ... moral sentiment is missing.

Glenn Beck

#30. IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE COULD LEARN WHAT I KNOW OF THE FIERCE HATRED OF THE PRIESTS OF ROME AGAINST OUR INSTITUTIONS, OUR SCHOOLS, OUR MOST SACRED RIGHTS, AND OUR SO DEARLY BOUGHT LIBERTIES, THEY WOULD DRIVE THEM OUT AS TRAITORS!

Abraham Lincoln

#31. If the people lose control of the arteries of trade and the natural sources of mechanical power, the nationalization of all industry should soon be expected. Our forefathers were alert to resist all encroachments upon their rights. If we wish to maintain our rights, we can do no less.

Calvin Coolidge

#32. From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own.

Carl Schurz

#33. Humanity has overcome the food chain, and having surpassed all other predators, has now turned to a strange form of cannibalism: humanity preys upon itself. We cull our own herd. We murder our own children. This is what we call "progress".

A.E. Samaan

#34. I think there is a puritanical wind that is blowing. I have never seen such a lack of separation between church and state in America, I don't believe in God, but if I did I would say that sex is a Godgiven right. Otherwise it's the end of our species.

Kevin Bacon

#35. We are confronted primarily with a moral issue ... whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.

John F. Kennedy

#36. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?

Joy Williams

#37. Only by zealously guarding the rights of the most humble, the most unorthodox, and the most despised among us can freedom flourish and endure in our land.

Frank Murphy

#38. We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?

Peter Singer

#39. Liberty is about our rights to question everything.

Ai Weiwei

#40. What does it mean to be an American? While each of us may have our own specific answer to that question, we likely can agree on the basic principles of America: freedom, equal opportunity, and rights accompanied by responsibilities.

Ben Nelson

#41. We add our voice ... to those who struggle for the recognition and protection for their rights and cultures, because to the extent that we respect our differences, we shall build a life with more justice.

Francisco Toledo

#42. In the great Declaration of our principles, it didn't say that all men are created equal 'if you so choose.' It said that all are created equal by the power and the will of God, and that we must respect their rights as we respect that will.

Alan Keyes

#43. A play that forces us to question our moral responsibility to the victims of human rights abuse.

Lynn Nottage

#44. We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans ...

William J. Clinton

#45. America was founded to be a beacon of liberty, particularly religious liberty. The framers of our Constitution sought to preserve religious liberty to such an extent that they made it the first right protected in the Bill of Rights.

Edwin Meese

#46. Majority rule must stop at our unalienable rights. Without that, pure democratic rule is a terrible thing. It's like two wolves and a lamb voting to see what's for dinner.

LaVoy Finicum

#47. The [Barack] Obama administration wants to take our rights to keep and bear arms away from us. They are trying to take our God, and our gun. And if they do that, they can impose a dictatorship upon us.

Ted Cruz

#48. If we continue to stand up for our rights, none of us alive today will ever have to pick up a weapon against our government. The bad news is that if those rights are watered down or taken away, the risk of tyranny will increase with each passing generation.

Glenn Beck

#49. This is the gay agenda: equality. Not special rights, but the rights that are already written by [our Founding Fathers].

LZ Granderson

#50. Our rights are not granted by governments," Snowden said. "They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

Edward Snowden

#51. The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

Jonathan Lethem

#52. Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society ... It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.

Stephen Harper

#53. As we have seen from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's example, even one justice can profoundly alter the meaning of those words for our citizens. Even one justice can deeply affect the rights and liberties of the American people.

Edward Kennedy

#54. Until the day arrives when all women decide that our rights are not negotiable, our future choices will not be secure.

Faye Wattleton

#55. Our rights come from God - not man, not a monarch, not a government.

Robert Hurt

#56. As the culture war rages on, Lord give us wisdom to see the difference between defending our rights and protesting our slights.

Kevin DeYoung

#57. We can't build a safer world with honorable intentions and good will alone. Achieving the fundamental goals our nation seeks in world affairs - peace, human rights, economics progress national independence and international stability - means supporting our friends and defending our interests.

Ronald Reagan

#58. By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.

Bill Cosby

#59. Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can't take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can't take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.

Faye Wattleton

#60. I think it's very important to have a public discussion about why we're denying our soldiers the ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

Ted Cruz

#61. It is time for the next generations to continue our struggle against social injustice and for the rights of humanity. It is in your hands.

Nelson Mandela

#62. Fifty percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent.

Robert Ballard

#63. Today there are people trying to take away rights that our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for: our right to vote, our right to choose, affordable quality education, equal pay, access to health care. We the people can't let that happen.

Kerry Washington

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. History has shown time and time again that
there is no such thing as all things being equal. That is why Jefferson
wrote that our inalienable rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. Nothing is guaranteed in life, especially happiness.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#67. Our crosses are our rights ... Because life is not about me, because this world is not my home, because I'm tired of defending myself, and because the God of the universe is my Defender.

Jennie Allen

#68. The whole crowd interrupted and told him, 'No, we won't let you go. You have worked hard for our rights and you can't quit now.'
'Then,' said Riel, 'if I must, I will desert.'
'If you desert, we will desert with you.

Gabriel Dumont

#69. I guess it's the curse of our generation, having to put aside our lives to do the right thing.

Allan Dare Pearce

#70. If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can.

Thomas Jefferson

#71. Conservatives have excellent credentials to speak about human rights. By our efforts, and with precious little help from self-styled liberals, we were largely responsible for securing liberty for a substantial share of the world's population and defending it for most of the rest.

Margaret Thatcher

#72. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

David Harvey

#73. By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two. So in the wonderful reciprocities of being, we can never reach the higher levels until all our fellows ascend with us.

Edwin Markham

#74. There are only two reasons why you should ever be asked to give your youngsters. One is defense of our homes. The other is the defense of our Bill of Rights and particularly the right to worship God as we see fit. Every other reason advanced for the murder of young men is a racket, pure and simple.

Smedley D. Butler

#75. The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics!

Thomas Jefferson

#76. The young intellectuals are all chanting, "Revolution, Revolution," but I say the revolution will have to start in our homes, by achieving equal rights for women.

Qiu Jin

#77. I think, for one, the LGBTQ community is just a paragon of leadership, of standing up and saying "these are our rights, and we deserve them." As a model of activism, it's so wonderful what the community has been able to achieve towards goals like marriage equality.

Jill Stein

#78. Knocking on doors wasn't working. We had to try something else. Remember the kids whose natural curiosity brought them into our little office on the corner? We set up a Freedom School that was fashioned after the SNCC Freedom Schools in Mississippi and other places.

Junius Williams

#79. And although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it's been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior - behavior too often celebrated in black culture.

Jason L. Riley

#80. They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can't deserve our rights." Others

John Howard Griffin

#81. You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.

Sojourner Truth

#82. What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible. Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong.

Desmond Tutu

#83. The God we worship is no respecter of persons, but He is a respecter of men's rights, and a guardian of them-a fact clearly shown in the heaven-inspired Constitution of our country, and in the Gospel itself, which might be termed the Constitution of Eternity.

Orson F. Whitney

#84. Not a single time have we gotten our rights from Congress or the President, we get them from God. And when He gives us those rights, He puts a warning bell inside of us. When somebody tries to take them, a warning bell goes off. And that's what America is feeling right now.

Glenn Beck

#85. Men tend to treat women as fragile creatures, but our bodies were built to withstand pain and hard work, think with profound insight. We were created to do what men can't. And if that isn't reason enough for us to be treated equal, I'm not sure what is.

Caroline George

#86. While we welcome people of all faiths in America we cannot be so naive as to expect all countries to do the same. But we cannot allow their cultural mores to snuff out our religious freedoms or the freedom of women to have equal rights.

Michael Huffington

#87. One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.

Martin Luther King Jr.

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

Rudy Giuliani

#89. How narrow we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!

John Muir

#90. But what about ugly bastards? What about us? What about our rights to be kissed?

Hanif Kureishi

#91. The legal system we have and the rule of law are far more responsible for our traditional liberties than any system of one man one vote. Any country or Government which wants to proceed towards tyranny starts to undermine legal rights and undermine the law.

Margaret Thatcher

#92. I wasn't looking for notoriety [when we marched]. But if that's what it took [to get attention], I didn't care how many licks I got. It just made me even more determined to fight for our cause.

Amelia Boynton Robinson

#93. The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars, and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace.

John Sulston

#94. The woman's march of today have deep roots and shoud be respected. Our country must find unification and not division, with men as well as women of all parties rallying around their cause!" Captain Hank Bracker, author of "The Exciting Story of Cuba.

Hank Bracker

#95. Those of us who decided to work for democracy in Burma made our choice in the conviction that the danger of standing up for basic human rights in a repressive society was preferable to the safety of a quiescent life in servitude

Aung San

#96. 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

#97. We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.

Anthony Lewis

#98. Tyranny Absolves all faith; and who invades our rights, However his own commence, can never be But an usurper.

Henry Brooke

#99. The United Nations will be at the heart of our international activities. France will assume its full responsibilities at the Security Council by putting its status at the service of peace, respect for human rights and development.

Francois Hollande

#100. Political solutions-accountable to the people and enforceable by their elected representatives- deserve another shot before we throw in the towel and settle for corporate codes, independent monitors and the privatisation of our collective rights as citizens.

Naomi Klein