Quotes about Rights

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them. It requires a civility in which I respect a person's ultimate worth and seek to persuade but not to coerce.

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them. It requires a civility in which I respect a person's ultimate worth and seek to persuade but not to coerce. For this reason modern democracy grew out of Christian soil. We must exercise the skill of ethical surgeons in deciding which moral principles apply to society at large and how best to apply them.

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them.

If we are to save a society in deep trouble, many changes are necessary. In terms of rights, two changes are mandatory. First, far more Americans need to ask what is good for society? before asking what is good for my group? Second, we need people to speak up on behalf of the one truly helpless group—children. For this to happen, people must start to think of children as human beings, not as property.

Human beings want to be happy, and they have a right to want to be. Far from being a selfish or ignoble goal, this is one of the distinguishing features of human beings. To the extent that animals can be said to want anything, what they want is to avoid pain and to be sated, but not to be happy.

Children are not owned by parents. They have an inalienable right to come into this world to a loving mother and father who are married to each other. And they have an inalienable right to be protected from all who would hurt them.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

I remembered seeing the lines of people who had waited for hours and hours to vote in the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. The lines snaked on for miles. I remember wondering at the time, as U.S. voter turnout was hovering under forty percent, how long that sense of joy and appreciation for the right to vote would last and whether there was any way to revive it in America among those who have never been denied the right to vote.

We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much.

Our union helps ensure that we earn fair pay and benefits.

Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.

Pro-lifers have long been castigated for bringing private values into the public square. But actually it is the pro-abortion position that is based on merely personal views and values.