The Rights Quotes

#1. What gets lost is that the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.

Rand Paul

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

Michael N. Castle

#5. People should not be able to vote to take away the rights of others.

Ron Paul

#6. 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

#7. A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins. Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

#8. For a consumer society thrives by stoking unquenchable desires into unsustainable cravings and fanning them with an inflated rage for rights. The restlessness it creates by providing false satisfactions and deadening true desires simultaneously fuels the economy and destroys happiness.

Os Guinness

#9. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy - enforced through the rights of the firstborn son - has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions.

Hanna Rosin

#10. The rights of the people to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods.

Thomas Jefferson

#11. As long as enough people can be frightened, then all people can be ruled. That is how it works in a democratic system and mass fear becomes the ticket to destroy rights across the board.

James Bovard

#12. 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

#13. The world must know that America holds to the highest standards of military conduct and human rights protections. Anything less is unacceptable.

Barbara Mikulski

#14. If the prisoner is beaten, it is an arrogant expression of fear.

Ghassan Kanafani

#15. Few governments in the world, for example, praise human rights more ardently than does the government of France, and few have a worse record of supporting tyrants and killers.

Richard Perle

#16. All repressive laws must be revoked, and laws introduced to protect the rights of the people.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#17. When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,

Dick Cheney

#18. Nothing appeals to children more than justice, and they should be taught in the nursery to "play fair" in games, to respect each other's property and rights, to give credit to others, and not to take too much credit to themselves.

Emily Post

#19. The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others, and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor.

Voltaire

#20. Joe Arpaio needs no help from me getting attention. For years he has been a beacon of bigotry and intolerance for all the world to see. The list of human and civil-rights abuses he's committed in Maricopa County is long and well documented.

Conor Oberst

#21. My mandate ... is to promote the protection, rights and welfare of children ...

Olara Otunnu

#22. 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

#23. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#24. She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol?

Patricia Highsmith

#25. [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

#26. The so-called civil rights movement as it exists today is used as a Communist program for revolution in America.

Ezra Taft Benson

#27. This is America, and you have the right to remain sick. If you choose to treat yourself and your family, that is within your rights, and is necessarily your sole decision based on what you know to be best.

Andrew Saul

#28. 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

#29. Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

Samuel Gompers

#30. I liked the name of the amendment. I couldn't help feeling uneasy that the church was opposing something with a name as beautiful as the Equal Rights Amendment.

Sonia Johnson

#31. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.

Frederick Douglass

#32. I support this proposal and agree with this great and important initiative to abolish militarism and war. I will continue to speak out for an end to the institution of militarism and war and for institutions built on international law and human rights and nonviolent conflict resolution.

Mairead Corrigan

#33. The basis of peace and stability, in any society, has to be the fullest respect for the human rights of all its people.

John Hume

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. What strikes me most of all in Christian culture, which is supposed to be concerned with the rights of the weakest, is the lack of regard toward animals. Maybe because they're thought to be soulless.

Dacia Maraini

#38. Regardless of whatever "rights" we think we may have, giving the Lord a bad testimony will never be one of them.5

Lennie Spitale

#39. A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Thomas Jefferson

#40. The Olympics brought a lot of development to Beijing, but I don't see that there have been any changes to human rights as a result of the Olympics.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#41. Gospel music is nothing but singing of good tidings -- spreading the good news. It will last as long as any music because it is sung straight from the human heart.

Mahalia Jackson

#42. I don't say women's rights - I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#43. Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established.

Thomas Jefferson

#44. I got used to it, in a way, being this sack of skin full of problems, because having a body doesn't give you the right to have one that works correctly. Having a body doesn't seem to give you any rights at all.

Catherine Lacey

#45. The wants of the grandparents has become the needs of the parents and the rights of the children.

R.K. Koslowsky

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

Andrea Mitchell

#49. He promised to write a book later about the trip. He sold the rights to the motion pictures and still photographs that would be taken, and he agreed to give a long lecture series on his return. In all these arrangments, there was one basic assumption - that Shackleton would survive.

Alfred Lansing

#50. 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

#51. The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people.

William J. Clinton

#52. The anti-feminism bacllash has been set off not by women's achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finishing line.

Susan Faludi

#53. In 1967, only 4% of Americans approved of interracial marriage, yet the Supreme Court dismissed the desire of 96% of Americans who did not support it in order to preserve the rights of the minority.

Kathy Baldock

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. I wanted to represent minorities in the respect of people who had been bullied in school or people who were gay or lesbian or trans or people who aren't blonde haired and blue-eyed. I have short hair, and I am covered in tattoos. I like showing people that it's within their rights to be different.

Ruby Rose

#57. The rule of law is critical for economic development; without clear property rights and contract enforcement, it is difficult for businesses to break out of small circles of trust.

Francis Fukuyama

#58. You get the same equal rights that we do when we have a civil partnership. Heterosexual people get married. We can have civil partnerships.

Elton John

#59. Rep. John Lewis, Georgia Democrat and a civil rights leader during the 1960s, was one of those calling on the president for a more robust federal response, such as President Dwight D. Eisenhower did against Jim Crow-defending Southern governors.

Anonymous

#60. Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women.

Nadezhda Krupskaya

#61. The U.N. is worse than disaster. The U.N. creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty and anti-Semitic, among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.

Charles Krauthammer

#62. We've painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare - triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights - or a leap to an entirely different level. We've taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.

Terence McKenna

#63. Terrorists and their allies believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Bill of Rights and every charter of liberty ever written are lies to be burned and destroyed and forgotten.

George W. Bush

#64. Despite all of the social advances in women's rights and the push for gender equality in the workplace, it seems like modern men still want a woman that they can take care of at home.

Shannon Mullen

#65. I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.

Henry Louis Gates

#66. 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

#67. The product supply chain, from source material to store, is an organizing map for delivering human rights.

Julia Ormond

#68. The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.

Fiona Shaw

#69. The connection between women's human rights, gender equality, socioeconomic development and peace is increasingly apparent.

Mahnaz Afkhami

#70. One of the biggest issues that we face is that we have people who have their own particular concerns, whether it's on abortion, birth control, divorce and remarriage, civil rights or social justice.

William P. Leahy

#71. Each time I went to create my website, I needed imagery. It was complicated to get, the process was expensive, I had to negotiate rights. I knew there had to be a better way.

Jon Oringer

#72. The civil rights situation is like a pregnancy. It will get worse, I believe, before it gets better. What the usual pregnancy comes to is a decent baby. That is what we all hope will be the end product of this stress. It is customary, at the end of a pregnancy, to have for your pains a decent baby.

Gwendolyn Brooks

#73. I'm 21 years old, and it's kind of uncomfortable for me to talk about, but I'm in the 1 percent as far as my income and tax bracket. But now that I'm here, there's no amount of money you can wave in front of my face that will make me understand depriving people of human rights.

Halsey

#74. Economic dynamism can be combined with environmental and social responsibility. High financial returns can go hand in hand with respect for human rights, and the preservation of the planet's natural resources

David Miliband

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

LZ Granderson

#76. For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.

Henry Rollins

#77. A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact".

Erik Naggum

#78. It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

#79. The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.

Michael Gerson

#80. I knew that, in a large degree, we were trying an experiment
that of testing whether or not it was possible for Negroes to build up and control the affairs of a large education institution. I knew that if we failed it wold injure the whole race.

Booker T. Washington

#81. No American president can support an Egypt that calls into question the historic treaty between Israel and Egypt. And no American president can support an Egypt that doesn't fully recognize women's rights or the rights of religious minorities.

Condoleezza Rice

#82. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.

Booker T. Washington

#83. Success on the front of women's rights will look like a world not only with obvious advances - where no girl is denied access to education, for instance - but also one with more subtle changes in how we regard gender and gender stereotypes.

Adora Svitak

#84. What makes America special is that people come here, assimilate and become American with all of the rights and responsibilities citizenship bestows.

Zoe Lofgren

#85. For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.

Vandana Shiva

#86. In some places women have all the rights they deserve and in others there are big restrictions - in some countries they even mutilate women.

Michelle Bachelet

#87. I came at age in the '60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.

David Talbot

#88. Most students graduate from high school knowing nine words about the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and "I Have a Dream." And that's it!

Andrew Aydin

#89. I think whoever is the president [he] must guard your liberties, must not erode your rights in America.

George W. Bush

#90. The start of empowering women comes with acknowledgment of thought that every born child is equal irrespective of its sex.

Nikita Dudani

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.

Walter Lippmann

#94. 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

#95. The Civil War won formal rights for Negroes, but failed to win social justice and factual democracy. The actual result has been segregation, and fear and ignorance for both whites and blacks.

Paul Goodman

#96. No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.

Daphne Merkin

#97. The only marches I have ever witnessed under a banner of so-called "Christianity" have been to enforce oppression and incite hatred and intolerance - and to deprive people of their equal civil rights.

Christina Engela

#98. An advanced human rights friendly Constitution is fine and well - but what good is it if it is not put into practice? The government says it cherishes the principles in the SA Constitution, and yet acts in a manner which cannot be reconciled with that very Constitution.

Christina Engela

#99. 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

#100. Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was. And the Democrat Party and the black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide.

E.W. Jackson