Rights Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! —and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

Frank Moore Colby

I am all for people having their heart in the right place; but the right place for a heart is not inside the head.

Katharine Whitehorn

Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process. If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities.

Lawrence Lessig

Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor.

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.

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

Georges Bernanos

The liberty of the press is the palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman.

By the theory of our Government majorities rule, but this right is not an arbitrary or unlimited one. It is a right to be exercised in subordination to the Constitution and in conformity to it. One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights. Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression.

The liberals in the House strongly resemble liberals I have known through the last two decades in the civil rights conflict. When it comes time to show on which side they will be counted, they excuse themselves.

Shirley Chisholm

When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.

Walter Kaufmann

I've read the last page of the Bible. It's all going to turn out all right.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

William O. Douglas

Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made.

Pope Benedict XVI

Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.

William Lloyd Garrison

My public life is before you; and I know you will believe me when I say, that when I sit down in solitude to the labours of my profession, the only questions I ask myself are, What is right? What is just? What is for the public good?

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

P. G. Wodehouse

You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.

Charlotte Brontë

It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free.

Thomas Clarkson

The business with high ethical standards has three primary advantages over competitors whose standards are lower:
1) A business of high principle generates greater drive and effectiveness because people know they can do the right thing decisively and with confidence. ...
2) A business of high principle attracts high-caliber people more easily, thereby gaining a basic competitive and profit edge. ...
3) A business of high principle develops better and more profitable relations with customers, competitors , and the general public, because it can be counted on to do the right thing at all times. By the consistently ethical character of its actions, it builds a favorable image.