Rights Quotes

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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.

There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.

David Starr Jordan

God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.

Chester W. Nimitz

We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency—clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action along the right lines of thought. America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us; and it can consist of all of us only as our spirits are banded together in a common enterprise.

Mexicans: let us now pledge all our efforts to obtain and consolidate the benefits of peace. Under its auspices, the protection of the laws and of the authorities will be sufficient for all the inhabitants of the Republic. May the people and the government respect the rights of all. Between individuals, as between nations, peace means respect for the rights of others.

Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.

A business of high principle generates greater drive and effectiveness because people know that they can do the right thing decisively and with confidence.

Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.

The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The emphasis must not be on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The German landscape is something unique that we cannot disturb and have no right to destroy. The more densely populated our 'living space' becomes with settlements, the greater our hunger will grow for unspoilt nature. The ever increasing spiritual damage caused by life within the big city will make this hunger practically uncontrollable... when we build here on this the landscape of our homeland we must be clear that we will protect its beauty; and in places where this beauty has already disappeared, we will reconstruct it.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

I am tired of talk that comes to nothing It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. It does not require many words to speak the truth.

He has a future and I have a past, so we should be all right.

Lady Randolph Churchill

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret. You are looking into a predator's eyes. Most predators have eyes set right on the front of their heads, so they can use binocular vision to sight and track their prey.

Should it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, from whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be? Arguments of this cast are an insult to common sense, and savour of passion. The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger, and though conviction may not silence many boisterous disputants, yet, when any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Nations are represented by their poets and their writers in the open competition for the Nobel Prize. Consequently the award of the Prize by the Academy glorifies not only the author but the people whose son he is, and it bears witness that that nation has a share in the universal achievement, that its efforts are fruitful, and that it has the right to live for the profit of mankind. If this honour is premous to all, it is infinitely more so to Poland. It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph. Like Galileo, one is forced to think when before the eyes of the world homage has been rendered to the importance of Poland's achievement and her genius.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

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I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Often misattributed to Voltaire, but actually originated by Evelyn Beatrice Hall to describe Voltaire's opinions.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Right knows no boundaries and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Georges Bernanos

The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution…. There should be, therefore, great resistance to … redefining the category of rights deemed to be fundamental. Otherwise, the Judiciary necessarily takes to itself further authority to govern the country without express constitutional authority.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked like he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say When.

P. G. Wodehouse

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

There is but one honest limit to the rights of a sentient being; it is where they touch the rights of another sentient being.

If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.

Lysander Spooner