Top 100 Rights Of Man Quotes
#1. Freedom of the press, the surest guaranty of the rights of man.
Sarah Vowell
#2. The concept that flourished during the most glorious periods of republican Rome and that appeared in the Twelve Tables of the Law as one of the first, though as yet imperfect, affirmations of the rights of man, inspired the struggle between patricians and plebeians.
Ernesto Teodoro Moneta
#3. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
Thomas Paine
#5. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
Arthur Koestler
#6. 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
#7. Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.
Thomas Jefferson
#8. It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.
Charles Baudelaire
#9. Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle, every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#10. Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#11. They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man.
Edmund Burke
#12. What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate.
Thomas Jefferson
#13. Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.
Maximilien Robespierre
#14. European revolutions followed textbooks - Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, Karl Marx' Communist Manifesto or Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf - while Mexicans wrote their texts after the fighting was over.
Richard Grabman
#15. The basic human rights documents-the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man-were written by political, not by religious, leaders.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#16. Our political and constitutional rights, so called, are but the natural and inherent rights of man, asserted, carried out, and secured by modes of human contrivance.
Gerrit Smith
#17. God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that anybody may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: 'This is my country!
Benjamin Franklin
#18. The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.
Thomas Jefferson
#19. The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
Walter Lippmann
#20. The rights of man are poor things beside the eyes of hungry children. Their hurts are keener than the soreness of injustice.
Richard Llewellyn
#21. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete
Rod Serling
#22. There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man ... We must exterminate all our enemies.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#23. We must recognize the fundamental rights of man. There can be no true national life in our democracy unless we give unqualified recognition to freedom of religious worship and freedom of education.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#24. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.
Barack Obama
#25. Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to protect the rights of man, I am a rebel. Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to give man liberty, to clothe him in all his just rights, I am on the side of that rebellion.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#26. I came from a family who believed in, in quotes, the Rights of Man, who believed that in order to justify the sort of luxurious life that the majority of us have, related to the whole world, that you had to do something.
Richard Attenborough
#27. The rights of man as the foundation of just Government had been long understood but the superstructures projected had been sadly defective
James Madison
#28. The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity.
Thomas Paine
#29. Ours is a representative republic with a Constitution in which is recognized the natural law and the natural rights of man. It is a republic with a spiritual foundation characterized by freedom - freedom for the individual and for his society.
Ezra Taft Benson
#30. This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.
Edmund Burke
#31. If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
Hannah Arendt
#32. The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and in-grafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.
Thomas Jefferson
#33. Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.
Peter Kropotkin
#34. We [Americans] have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.
Woodrow Wilson
#36. If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#37. Liberty does not consist in mere declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action.
Woodrow Wilson
#38. Look, if I'd wanted a lecture on the rights of man, I'd have gone to bed with Martin Luther.
Rowan Atkinson
#39. They may be all comprehended under three heads - 1st, Superstition; 2d, Power; 3d, the common interests of society, and the common rights of man.
Thomas Paine
#40. Toleration in religion was one of the great rights of man, and a man ought never to be deprived of what was his natural right.
Charles James Fox
#41. 2. We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.
Winston S. Churchill
#42. ... why do men continue to practice in themselves, the absurdities they despise in others?
Thomas Paine, The rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke's attack on the French Revolution (2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1791), p. 41.
Thomas Paine
#43. 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
#44. Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
Victor Hugo
#45. The French revolution taught us the rights of man.
Thomas Sankara
#46. The real or supposed rights of man are of two kinds, active and passive; the right in certain cases to do as we list; and the right we possess to the forbearance or assistance of other men.
William Godwin
#47. We look back, already, with astonishment, at the daring outrages committed by despotism, on the reason and rights of man; we look forward with joy, to the period, when it shall be despoiled of all its usurpations, and bound forever in the chains, with which it had loaded its miserable victims.
James Madison
#48. While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things,
The fate of empires and the fall of kings;
While quacks of State must each produce his plan,
And even children lisp the Rights of Man;
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,
The Rights of Woman merit some attention.
Robert Burns
#49. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?
Henry David Thoreau
#50. Surely of all 'rights of man', this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.
Thomas Carlyle
#51. My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery, or ceasing to prate on the rights of man.
William Lloyd Garrison
#52. Old age is never honored among us, but only indulged, as childhood is; and old men lose one of the most precious rights of man,
that of being judged by their peers.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#53. The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.
Fulton J. Sheen
#54. Whatever a man imagines he can attain, if he doesn't become too arrogant and encroach on the rights of the gods.
Charles Lindbergh
#55. It must be instilled in man that 'peace' is the best legacy we would leave behind for the generations to come, as we practice and follow the edicts of human rights.
Henrietta Newton Martin
#56. For my part, I do not feel that the scheme of future happiness, which ought by rights to be in preparation for me, will be at all interfered with by my not meeting again the man I have in my. mind.
James Payn
#57. To attribute rights to animals is to ignore the purpose and justification of rights - to protect the interests of man.
Alex Epstein
#58. 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
#59. If modern civilised man had to keep the animals he eats, the number of vegetarians would rise astronomically.
Christian Morgenstern
#60. The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.
Thomas Paine
#61. In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man's conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.
Samuel Johnson
#62. 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
#63. Rights are not gifts from one man to another, nor from one class of men to another. It is impossible to discover any origin of rights otherwise than in the origin of man; it consequently follows that rights appertain to man in right of his existence, and must therefore be equal to every man.
Thomas Paine
#64. Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
Ayn Rand
#65. Syldor was not a land of oppressive rules, roles, and labels. Here, love and power were open to, for, and between all; woman or man, rich or poor. What mattered was the sharpness of your mind, the speed of your blade, and the heat of your touch.
Natalia Marx
#66. I never think of myself as an attacker, only as a defender - usually of rights - mine and others.
Jay Woodman
#67. Man is Nature's most wonderful creature. Torturing him, crushing him, murdering him for his beliefs and ideas is more than a violation of human rights-it is a crime against all humanity.
Armando Valladares
#68. 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
#69. I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'
Al Gore
#70. Water helped ancient man learn those first lessons about the rights of others and responsibility to a larger society ... It became part of the moral and mental legacy parents passed on to their children.
Max Meyer
#71. A man may act as his conscience dictates so long as he does not infringe upon the rights of others. That is the spirit of true democracy, and all government by the Priesthood should be actuated by that same high motive.
David O. McKay
#72. Arlen Specter is the man who voted in favor of Bill Clinton during impeachment, voted against Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, voted against school choice for the District of Columbia, endorses an absolutist interpretation of abortion rights. He is bright and he is tough and he belongs elsewhere.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#73. Civilization is human rights, it is the path of setting man free from men, phobia, to survive it, we must cultivate the science of human relationships.
Audrey Hepburn
#74. Man's rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.
Samuel Adams
#75. Any alleged "right" of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another isn't and can't be a right.
Ayn Rand
#76. Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever.
Joseph Priestley
#77. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.
John Marshall Harlan
#78. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
Thomas Jefferson
#79. Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.
Thomas Jefferson
#80. Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.
Theodore Roosevelt
#81. 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
#82. We must continue to prove to the world that we can provide a rising standard of living for all men without loss of civil rights or human dignity to any man.
Robert Kennedy
#83. Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.
Ayn Rand
#84. The property a man has in his own industry, is violated, whenever he is forbidden the free exercise of his faculties or talents, except insomuch as they would interfere with the rights of third parties.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#85. When you expect a man to create your world of dreams, you fall into the doctrine against women and strengthen what we are supposed to fight back and demolish.
Namrata Kumari
#86. Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were only made for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered or enslaved.
John Muir
#87. There cannot be perfect civilization until Man realizes that the rights of every living creature are as sacred as his own.
David Starr Jordan
#88. He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Immanuel Kant
#89. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.
Michael Eric Dyson
#90. It is quite unlawful to demand, defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing or worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man.
Pope Leo XIII
#91. That place I'm talking about ain't nothing but a bloody slit in this world of His. But everybody wants to rule over it. It ain't for the white man to rule. Ain't for any man to rule.
Jonathan Odell
#92. May no one use religion as a pretext for actions against human dignity and against the fundamental rights of every man and woman.
Pope Francis
#93. Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.
Thomas Paine
#94. If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.
Howard Mumford Jones
#95. LRH wrote that the aims of Scientology are "a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where Man is free to rise to greater heights.
Leah Remini
#96. The woman has the right to be emancipated from the position of a drudge or a toy. She is entitled to a full equality in rights with man ...
Theodore Roosevelt
#97. As man develops, he places a greater value upon his own rights. Liberty becomes a grander and diviner thing. As he values his own rights, he begins to value the rights of others. And when all men give to all others all the rights they claim for themselves, this world will be civilized.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#98. In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining ... . We demand this fraud be stopped.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#99. But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.
George Bernard Shaw
#100. 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
