Rights Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

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. All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals. Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense.

If an adult uses violence on a child, the child will naturally assume that he too, has the right to use it on one smaller or weaker.

In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.

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

Oh, the comfort—the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—having neither to weigh thoughts, nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

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

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.

But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right.

Ray Stannard Baker

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!

It is all right to hold a conversation but you should let go of it now and then.

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.

W. E. B. Du Bois

Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.

José Ortega y Gasset

Republican patience with how unionism deals with the political institutions, and with key issues like equality and human rights, will be tested because, obviously, there will be a battle a day on these matters. So lets face up to all of this with our eyes wide open.

But please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.

Jehovah created the earth and therefore it is his by right of creation.

Joseph Franklin Rutherford

Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis.

Alfred P. Sloan

Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.

Calvin Coolidge

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

Prejudice and passion and suspicion are more dangerous than the incitement of self-interest or the most stubborn adherence to real differences of opinion regarding rights.

Even a stopped clock is right twice every day. After some years, it can boast of a long series of successes.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Sisters, I ain't clear what you be after. If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it?

Sojourner Truth