Rights Quotes
Sad Quotes about Rights

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 dinner.
- Larry Flynt

If I am happy in spite of my deprivations,
if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith,
so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life.
If, in short, I am an optimist,
my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
- Helen Keller
...
Helen Keller (1880-1968) overcame being both deaf and blind
to become a famous author, lecturer, and activist
for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and ending war.

The highest result of education is tolerance.
Long ago men fought and died for their faith;
but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, -
the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren
and their rights of conscience.
- Helen Keller

Property is intended to serve life,
and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect,
it has no personal being.
It is part of the earth man walks on.
It is not man.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

So long as we have enough people in this country willing
to fight for their rights,
we'll be called a democracy.
- Roger Nash Baldwin

The battle for women's rights has been largely won.
- Margaret Thatcher

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

I think this society suffers so much from too much freedom,
too many rights that allow people to be irresponsible.
- Boyd Rice

I'm strongly for a patient Bill of Rights.
Decisions ought to be made by doctors,
not accountants.
- Charles Schumer

Women's rights is not only an abstraction,
a cause; it is also a personal affair.
It is not only about us; it is also about me and you.
Just the two of us.
- Toni Morrison

The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.
- J. Paul Getty

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man.
An intelligent woman gives up.
- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Women have a lot to say about how to advance women's rights,
and governments need to learn from that,
listen to the movement and respond.
- Charlotte Bunch

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.
- Charles Fourier

There are only two things we should fight for.
One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.
- Smedley Butler

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs,
tables of do's and don'ts: we need books,
time, and silence.
Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.
- Philip Pullman

I hope the example of Saddam Hussein will give a lesson
to leaders of other countries where human rights are not respected.
- Shirin Ebadi

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights.
Politics are a lousy way to get things done.
Politics are, like God's infinite mercy,
a last resort.
- P. J. O'Rourke

Upholding human rights is not merely compatible with fighting terrorism,
it is essential.
- Joichi Ito

Equality of rights means that some people cannot simply
impose obligations on others,
for the moral agency and rights of those others would then be violated.
- Tom G. Palmer

After one year in the Texas League, the American League
bought the rights to my contract.
They optioned me back to the Texas League for the 1970 season.
- Jim Evans

When and under what conditions is the black man to
have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those
full civil rights which have so long been his in law?
- Benjamin Harrison

There are those who say to you - we are rushing this issue of civil rights.
I say we are 172 years late.
- Hubert H. Humphrey

All Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. King for
his bravery and commitment to civil rights and nonviolence
that changed this nation -
and world -
for the better.
- Eliot Engel

The rights of the individual are greatly prized in the developed world,
but in many other regions they are considered a luxury
reserved for the impossibly wealthy.
- Silvia Cartwright

The rights of copyright holders need to be protected,
but some draconian remedies that have been suggested
would create more problems than they would solve.
- Patrick Leahy

Christianity is the root of all democracy,
the highest fact in the rights of men.
- Novalis

The time has come to underscore the fact that our and
others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them.
- John Charles Polanyi

Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people.
That's what I've been doing all my life.
- Andrew Young

Civil Rights opened the windows.
When you open the windows, it does not mean that everybody will get through.
We must create our own opportunities.
- Mary Frances Berry

We treat sex so casually and use it for everything
but what it is-which is ultimately making another human
being with thoughts and feelings and rights.
- Lisa Kudrow

Cultural variety is always worth striving for,
but must never precede the declaration of human rights.
- Bjorn Ulvaeus

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Civil Rights Act.
- Bobby Scott

The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly held
that marriage is one of the most fundamental rights
that we have as Americans under our Constitution.
- Ted Olson

I want each and every West Virginian to have bragging rights.
I want to stop playing defense and start playing offense.
So, together, let us grab the reins of history.
- Joe Manchin III

I stand for simple justice, equal opportunity and human rights.
The indispensable elements in a democratic society -
and well worth fighting for.
- Helen Suzman

We would be false to our trust if we allowed the time
it takes to give effect to constitutional rights to
be used as the very reason for taking away those rights.
- Frank Murphy

What I am defending is the real rights of women.
A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.
- Phyllis Schlafly

The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma
is a struggle for life and dignity.
It is a struggle that encompasses our political,
social and economic aspirations.
- Aung San Suu Kyi

Here once again education is crucial,
it enables children to be become more aware of their
rights and to exercise them in a respectful manner
which helps them shape their own future.
- Carol Bellamy

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

The government of the United States is a device for
maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people,
with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.
- Calvin Coolidge

I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting
some false and most pernicious notions about consistency -
and to such a degree that the average man has
turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around
and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized,
where it should be his humiliation.
- Mark Twain

What libertarians assert is simply that differences
among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.
- Tom G. Palmer

I had advocated the establishment of a Negro industrial commission.
I had gestured against the growth of monopoly power.
I had introduced a few civil rights bills.
- Emanuel Celler

The Court today completes the process of converting
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee
that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.
- Antonin Scalia

Animal-rights advocates remind us of this admonition:
The ways in which people treat animals will be reflected
in how people relate to one another.
- William Greider

Without amendments we would never even have had the Bill of Rights.
- Adrian Cronauer

As a first step there must be an offer to achieve equality
of rights in disarmament by abolishing the weapons
forbidden to the Central Powers by the Peace Treaties.
- Arthur Henderson

Well, it's the last step of the civil rights movement:
You know,
wrap your hands around some money, right?
- Russell Simmons

If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks,
there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country,
because he refuses to leave the back of the bus.
- Kinky Friedman

As a strong supporter of our 2nd Amendment rights,
I believe tougher enforcement of our nation's existing
gun laws must be done before any more laws are enacted and put on the books.
- Jeff Miller

I've been a very effective leader in the gay rights movement,
though at times I've been controversial.
- Jean O'Leary

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others.
In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
- Immanuel Kant

I think Col.
North is first a U.S.
citizen and he has the same rights as you yourself do,
sir.
- Fawn Hall

By rights you're a king.
If I was you, I'd call for a new deal.
- O. Henry

Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration
of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature's God,
not from government.
- Paul Ryan

Cambodia possesses now the rights to look far into
the future and everything for making a future construction
is waiting for the Cambodian own efforts.
- Hun Sen

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

House was the first film where I had no influence on the script.
I had to buy the script with the game rights.
- Uwe Boll

Marriage is sacred and protected and has nothing to
do with violating our civil rights.
- Jack Kingston

A hundred things are done today in the divine name of Youth,
that if they showed their true colors would be seen
by rights to belong rather to old age.
- Wyndham Lewis

Civil rights are more important today than they ever
have been in our country.
There is so much divisiveness today.
- David Harris

They don't have special rights because we have civil
rights laws that protect them.
The laws work both ways.
- Tom Allen

And I spoke out on women's rights, like equal pay for equal work.
- Karen Morley

Lawyers should not be charged with the same crimes as their clients.
Trials related to political charges are not in accordance with human rights.
- Shirin Ebadi

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.
- attributed to Thomas Jefferson

A political prisoner is someone who is out fighting
for his or her people's rights and freedom and is imprisoned for that alone.
- Leonard Peltier

Eve Ensler is a hero of mine.
She's been working for the rights of women for a long time.
- Marcia Wallace

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning,
the new civil rights leader.
- Constance Baker Motley

America did not invent human rights.
In a very real sense, it is the other way around.
Human rights invented America.
- Jimmy Carter