Quotes about Rights

The privileges of a few do not make common law.

It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united.

Not a single time have we gotten a right from Congress or from the President. We get them from God.

There is something in us that refuses to be regarded as less than human. We are created for freedom.

The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.

Life in America shows that liberty, paired with law, is not to be feared.

The only object of liberty is life.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to my conscience, above all liberties.

Denying rights that protect lesser values to maintain rights that protect greater values is what good laws are supposed to do.

I'm not going to say I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I'm going to say I'm opposed to war. But I'm also opposed to protests that deny other people their rights.

I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don't contract them.

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they're not discriminated on the job.