Quotes about Rights

You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; right derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe

The way to secure liberty is to place it in the people's hands, that is, to give them the power at all times to defend it in the legislature and in the courts of justice

When People talk of the Freedom of Writing, Speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists: but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right… and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

For earthly princes lay aside their power when they rise up against God, and are unworthy to be reckoned among the number of mankind. We ought rather utterly to defy than to obey them whenever they are so restive and wish to spoil God of his rights, and, as it were, to seize upon his throne and draw him down from heaven.

However long I serve in public life, I'll stand on that basic liberty of the right to keep and bear arms.

No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.

Individual liberty depends upon keeping government under control.

... happily the Government of the United States... gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.