Rights Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure. Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity.

Theodore Roosevelt

I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.

Henry David Thoreau

I have asked a lot of my emotions-one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it's too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing, a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and—irritable murder.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Ernest Hemingway

The botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,--if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,--and they are themselves so much the better morally for it.

Henry David Thoreau

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

A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.

Arthur Schopenhauer

A true politeness does not result from any hasty and artificial polishing, it is true, but grows naturally in characters of the right grain and quality, through a long fronting of men and events, and rubbing on good and bad fortune.

Henry David Thoreau

What right can give anyone authority to inflict torture upon a citizen when it is still unknown whether he is innocent or guilty?

Catherine the Great

There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.

I like the martial and commanding air with which the right honorable Gentleman treats facts. He stands no nonsense from them.

Winston Churchill

What! Would I be turned back from doing a thing that I had determined to do, and that I knew to be right, by the airs and interference of such a person, or any person I may say? No, I have no idea of being so easily persuaded. When I have made up my mind, I have made it.

No throne exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and crossbones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only businesswise-merely as retail differs from wholesale.

I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.

The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.

Edgar Allan Poe

At first the analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst's construction from his own memory.

It gets laughed at because it is a small town, I know, but nevertheless it is a place where great men may be born any day, for fair winds and foul blow right on over it without distinction.

Henry David Thoreau

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

Henry David Thoreau

The foregoing history may not be precisely accurate in every particular; but I am sure it is sufficiently so, for all the uses I shall attempt to make of it, and in it, we have before us,
the chief material enabling us to correctly judge whether the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is right or wrong.

Abraham Lincoln

The 'Union' arrangements are all a humbug. They reverse the scriptural order, calling the righteous and not sinners to repentance. Let us not be slandered or intimidated to turn from our duty. Eternal right makes might. As we understand our duty, let us do it!

Abraham Lincoln

We cannot freely and wisely choose the right way for ourselves unless we know both good and evil.

A state of affairs which leads to daily vexation is not the right state.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We intend to release Leopard at the end of 2006 or early 2007, right around the time when Microsoft is expected to release Longhorn.