Quotes about Rights

I don't think the Egyptian people want to see what is a very clear effort to obtain political and economic rights turn into any kind of new form of oppression or suppression or violence or letting loose criminal elements.

I've been working with Pat Robertson on Africa debt-relief, and we disagree on virtually everything except certain very specific, inalienable rights, and the truth is that morality and patriotism come in all shapes and sizes.

Everybody wants to talk about their rights and privileges. Twenty-five years ago, people talked about their obligations and responsibilities. - as spoken by Lou Holtz, former Notre Dame Coach

And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge...

Use your liberty in Christ to set others free, not to assert your own rights.

When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.

The institutions of black enslavement and white supremacy did not exist before Democrats in the South created them. The very same institutions then became the mechanisms that Democrats used to build their power, and also to repel and defeat attempts by Republicans to extend rights and opportunities to black Americans.

The Republican ethos underlying these landmark provisions was aptly framed by the great abolitionist Republican, Frederick Douglass. Douglass said, "It is evident that white and black must fall or flourish together. In light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion, and every right, privilege and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color."

This was the clarion cry taken up by the GOP in the aftermath of the Civil War. Virtually all the black leaders who emerged from that era were Republicans who supported the GOP's call to remove race as the basis of government policy and social action. Historian Eric Foner writes that black activists of the antebellum era embraced "an affirmation of Americanism that insisted blacks were entitled to the same rights and opportunities that white citizens enjoyed."

The Declaration of Independence does not mean we are equal in endowments, only in rights.

The earliest opponents of slavery in America were Christians, mostly Quakers and evangelical Christians. They took seriously the biblical idea that we are all equal in the eyes of God, and interpreted it to mean that no person has the right to rule another person without his consent.

Inequality of outcomes is not seen as a necessary evil that government should seek to remedy; rather, the government itself exists to guard citizens' right to accumulate unequal fortunes and property.