Quotes About Public Rights

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. [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

#4. There are some rights that are so fundamental to our society that you'd think the public debate would be closed on them. The right of every American citizen to vote - regardless of age, race, or income level - is one of them.

Martin O'Malley

#5. The battle for public support for the wars was played out through a combination of the liberal 'feminist' discourse of rights and the hawkish premise that only carpet-bombing the oppressive enemy could solve the problem.

Nina Power

#6. We demand that segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963! We demand that we have effective civil rights legislation - no compromise, no filibuster - and that include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC and the right to vote.

Bayard Rustin

#7. I think Democrats are right. We fight for the American dream, for the environment, for privacy rights, a woman's right to choose, a good public education system.

Barbara Boxer

#8. One cannot fail to notice the inconsistency of those rejecting human rights: their rejection takes place in the public square created by human rights. It is difficult to reject human rights without using them.

Filip Spagnoli

#9. An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.

Hugo Black

#10. Today's secular libertarians, who want to remove biblical religion from public life, have trouble making sense of the civil rights movement because it was so clearly a religiously inspired movement that entered the public arena and made a major difference in American life.

Bruce L. Shelley

#11. Women had a rights movement where they fought for changes. Men ... don't band together in quite that way. It happens not in such a public-cascade way as in a house-to-house way.

Hanna Rosin

#12. I am going to sing lesbian love songs and support gay rights no matter what. The rest is public relations.

Jasmine Guy

#13. I'm not sure about prizes. I don't know how far you can seriously raise public consciousness about poetry. Having a 'National Poetry Day,' like a 'No Smoking Day,' is just shelving the problem. Things which should by rights be every day are not best served by these things.

John Fuller

#14. The whole land seems aroused to discussion on the province of woman, and I am glad of it. We are willing to bear the brunt of thestorm, if we can only be the means of making a break in that wall of public opinion which lies right in the way of woman's rights, true dignity, honor and usefulness.

Angelina Grimke

#15. We live in a country where our young ladies who have recently attained the age of puberty cannot afford sanitary pads, but our men and women in public offices have ipads which they do not even know how to use.

Patrick L.O. Lumumba

#16. I consider the war of America against Britain as the country's war, the public's war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property.

Thomas Paine

#17. 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

#18. Health care is not a privilege. It's a right. It's a right as fundamental as civil rights. It's a right as fundamental as giving every child a chance to get a public education.

Rod Blagojevich

#19. Bishop Frederick Henry of Calgary is facing at least two official objections to his public statements along with expensive hearings before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for expressing his biblical views on same sex marriage.

Stockwell Day

#20. 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

#21. A clear enunciation of these rights needs to be enshrined in the constitution to guarantee that this basic right of law-abiding gun owners and sportsmen shall not be infringed upon by anti-gun public officials.

Charlton Heston

#22. [Asserting] important First Amendment rights ... why should [executions] be the one area that is conducted behind closed doors? ... Why shouldn't executions be public?

Phil Donahue

#23. The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights.

William Blackstone

#24. It was so crucial to the Civil Rights Movement that on June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King came to town, walked down Woodward Avenue with more than 100,000 people and delivered the first major public iteration of his "I Have A Dream" speech, two months before he did it in Washington.

David Maraniss

#25. Our rights come from our Creator and it is impossible to define America if you do not talk in public about where your rights come from.

Newt Gingrich

#26. There are turning points in everyone's life when we have to fight, even if we have to do it by ourselves and in public.

Junius Williams

#27. There is more than one way to be Kluxed, and we need to think about ourselves and the kind of people we elect into public office.

Stetson Kennedy

#28. If it's a situation in which the public is being given access, you can't discriminate against the media and say, as a general matter, that the media don't have access, because their access rights, of course, correspond with those of the public.

John Roberts

#29. Consideration for the rights and feelings of others is not merely a rule for behavior in public but the very foundation upon which social life is built.

Emily Post

#30. Not upholding a persons legal rights is a form of abuse. Unfortunately, USA government abuse of the general public is a normal state of affairs in many areas.

Steven Magee

#31. My goal in signing these [gun control ] bills is to enhance public safety by tightening our existing laws in a responsible and focused manner, while protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

Jerry Brown

#32. I am grateful that I have rights in the proverbial public square
but, as a practical matter, my most cherished rights are those that I possess in my bedroom and hospital room and death chamber.

Jacob M. Appel

#33. 'The Look of Silence' is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It's distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#34. The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.

Dan Savage

#35. After much deliberation, and after reviewing the legal, public policy and civil-rights questions presented, I support marriage equality for same-sex couples and believe that DOMA should be repealed.

Bob Casey Jr.

#36. Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school.

Melinda Harmon

#37. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.

Rachel Carson

#38. No genuine change in society ever occurs without the mass public getting behind a cause. The good guys in government are counting on enough of us common people waking up and demanding more rights and greater freedoms.

James Morcan

#39. These three brothers were not afforded the opportunity to defend themselves in a court of law. They were not given a fair and public trial. Paramilitaries, under the command of senior Ministry of Interior officials, denied them these rights and shot them in cold blood.

Garry Robbins

#40. To get away from poverty, you need several things at the same time: school, health, and infrastructure - those are the public investments. And on the other side, you need market opportunities, information, employment, and human rights.

Hans Rosling

#41. This is a turf battle. They are saying, 'The songwriters aren't getting paid.' Baloney. Songwriters are getting paid. They're paid sync rights and (mechanical) rights. They aren't getting paid for the public performance in a download because there is no public performance in a download.

Jonathan Potter

#42. It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract," he noted, "to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form," they assume an obligation to the public.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#43. All our hope rests upon the possibility of a change of the laws which concern it, so that only rape or the comission of public offence, when this can be proved at the same time, shall be punishable.

Richard Von Krafft-Ebing

#44. The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged - not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist's only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied.

Walter J. Phillips

#45. In 1998, I founded the American Center for Law and Justice, probably the premier public interest law firm in America defending the rights of believers.

Pat Robertson

#46. Housing is a human right. There can be no fairness or justice in a society in which some live in homelessness, or in the shadow of that risk, while others cannot even imagine it.

Jordan Flaherty

#47. Those people who want to express their religious beliefs on public property should enjoy the same rights that we provide to those protesting the war in Iraq.

Ernest Istook

#48. Together, the property rights and public choice schools show only that, if you start by assuming a purely individualistic model of human behavior and treat politics as if it were a pale imitation of the market, democracy will, indeed, make no sense.

Paul Starr

#49. Privatization is a neoliberal and imperialist plan. Health can't be privatized because it is a fundamental human right, nor can education, water, electricity and other public services. They can't be surrendered to private capital that denies the people from their rights.

Hugo Chavez

#50. I believe it is wrong to undermine public safety, and indeed public confidence in the concept of human rights, by allowing highly dangerous criminals and terrorists to trump the rights of the people of Britain to live in security and peace

David Cameron

#51. The period that I would anoint as the golden era in American journalism was from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. It had three separate major strands: the Civil Rights struggle over integration of schools and public facilities in the South; the Vietnam War; and Watergate.

Anonymous

#52. I was raised in Arizona, and I went to public school, and the extent of my knowledge of the civil-rights movement was the story of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder how much my generation knows.

Emma Stone

#53. The sea, as well as the air, is a free and common thing to all; and a particular nation cannot pretend to have the right to the exclusion of all others, without violating the rights of nature and public usage.

Elizabeth I

#54. As long as there are human rights to be defended; as long as there are great interests to be guarded; as long as the welfare of nations is a matter for discussion, so long will public speaking have its place.

William Jennings Bryan

#55. I said once that lies have no rights against truth. I was wrong. In daily life, it's the truth that's disenfranchised. What fits the popular narrative, what makes an observer happy with the consistency of events, is what is believed.

Adrian Lamo

#56. You know what offends me? Offended people. In a country with guaranteed rights to freedom of religion, its citizens are constantly trying to make faith in public spheres illegal, I am offended by that contradiction and want to talk about it as a comic.

Brad Stine

#57. 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

#58. As the prevailing voices in the public spotlight are predominantly men, stepping into the spotlight with the truth of who you are as a woman is political change.

Tabby Biddle

#59. Lethargy is the forerunner of death to the public liberty.

Thomas Jefferson

#60. All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.

Ben Shahn

#61. A corporation has no rights except those given it by law. It can exercise no power except that conferred upon it by the people through legislation, and the people should be as free to withhold as to give, public interest and not private advantage being the end in view.

William Jennings Bryan

#62. ... 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

#63. Well, there's 10 - there's 10 different - there's 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act, and nine out of 10 deal with public institutions and I'm absolutely in favor of. One deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that.

Rand Paul

#64. As a senator from the only true swing district in the Texas Senate, I've been targeted by the GOP for my outspoken criticism of their extremist attacks on public education and voting rights, to name just two examples.

Wendy Davis

#65. The public can have no rights springing from injustice to others.

Frederick Romilly

#66. When you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

#68. We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.

Barbara Jordan

#69. Obama wanted to offer his support to birth control activist Sandra Fluke. He wanted to express his disappointment that she has been the subject of inappropriate personal attacks and thank her for exercising her rights as a citizen to speak out on an issue of public policy.

Jay Carney

#70. I think the police and the FBI are quite capable of sacrificing the rights of a private citizen to what they consider the public interest.

Rex Stout

#71. I feel that my father's greatest legacy was the people he inspired to get involved in public service and their communities, to join the Peace Corps, to go into space. And really that generation transformed this country in civil rights, social justice, the economy and everything.

Caroline Kennedy

#72. As an actor, you have total rights to privacy and mystery, whatever your sexuality, whatever you do. I don't see why that has to be something you discuss openly because you do something in the public eye. I have no understanding of why we turn actors into celebrities.

Ben Whishaw

#73. Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

Rand Paul

#74. I believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools.

Andrew Cuomo

#75. I had my first amendment rights removed by a USA judge for a video that I recorded in the public sidewalk. The right to free speech and freedom of the press only partially exists in the USA.

Steven Magee

#76. The First Amendment does not guarantee the press a constitutional right of special access to information not available to the general public, nor does it cloak the inmate with special rights of freedom of speech.

Pete Wilson

#77. I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.

Henry A. Kissinger

#78. If a radical devolution of powers was possible, it would have been done before. The assumption of states' rights is gone. There's no support for it in the Supreme Court and there's no support for it in public opinion.

James Q. Wilson

#79. Since the global economic crisis began, the change in global attitudes is clear to see - and I think it is pitiful. Barack Obama came to China and he is probably the only president of the United States never to mention the words 'human rights' in public.

Ai Weiwei

#80. When sins become civil rights, there is a temptation for Christians to keep our mouths shut and turn what is supposed to be a public faith into a private faith, but we are commanded to not be ashamed of the gospel.

Mark Driscoll

#81. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

Robert H. Jackson

#82. 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.

Christopher Dodd

#83. I get the hypocrisy thing, but any human being is allowed to have a public and private face, and celebrities should have the same rights as regular people to decide what cards they lay down and what cards they hide.

Cindy Crawford

#84. Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture.

Orrin Hatch

#85. I detect the activist returning with a vengence.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#86. So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No.

Jon Stewart

#87. I stand on my public record as a defender of the human rights of Muslims, notably my work for Moazzam Begg and other British Muslims detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

Hari Kunzru

#88. While we all respect the solemn responsibility of our law enforcement officers to protect the public, we must also safeguard the rights of Missourians to peaceably assemble and the rights of the press to report on matters of public concern.

Jay Nixon

#89. Advocating women's rights and greater opportunity for women in the workplace and in every avenue of public life is inconsistent with an insistence on mother taking care of children and housework.

Mary Frances Berry

#90. I am not here as a public official, but as a citizen of a troubled world who finds hope in a growing consensus that the generally accepted goals of society are peace, freedom, human rights, environmental quality, the alleviation of suffering, and the rule of law.

Jimmy Carter

#91. Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker, in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.

Thomas Jefferson