Rights Quotes - Page 102

Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

The right to life is the source of all rights -- and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights.

If a man speculates on what 'society' should do for the poor, he accepts thereby the collectivist premise that men's lives belong to society and that he, as a member of society, has the right to dispose of them...that psychological confession reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men's capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life.

There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule, executions without trial or with a mock trial for political offenses, the nationalization or expropriation of private property, and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.

In a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear. Never let fear prevent you from doing right.

I am not an individualist in the Western sense. Collectivism can become oppressive when it tries to dictate; the rights of the two should not clash.

[T]he moralists of Europe [have] pretended that beasts have no rights... a doctrine revolting/gross/barbarous... on which a native of the Asiatic uplands could not look without righteous horror.

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

The great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights... not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justifications for slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, and genocide... Moreover, religion enshrined hierarchy, authority, and inequality... It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake.

Education is the civil rights issue of our generation.

I don't have any doubts either about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps some more should be added to the list, but I don't have the slightest doubt about human rights.

Right now, American government has stepped back from offering any kinds of protection for human rights and public health. And the fossil fuel industry thinks that they have just absolute free rein to go for it. The one thing in the way is public opposition. It's civil society. It's activism.

I stand on the shoulders of giants that have gone before me, in terms of affording people like myself, women, the access to democracy, the vote, medical treatment, education, everything that I've been given. It's all been earned. Therefore I feel it's incumbent on me personally to just contribute something, to add to a collective voice that needs to be here right now, to build it up to a tipping point, to make the world aware that women's rights still have to be addressed and that the word 'feminism' has been devalued and needs to be reclaimed.

It's so simple: Right to marriage is a civil right, which like all civil rights should not depend on what state you happen to live in.

I think human self-hatred may be the great untold story of the millennium. It's the common thread linking deep ecology and animal rights, the love and money we lavish on pets, the uneasy longing for extraterrestrials to be meddling with us.

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That's what I've been doing all my life.

The Soviet Union is going to have a human-rights explosion. You'll have hundreds of thousands of dissidents.

There's no problem on the planet that can't be solved without violence. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement.

One cannot get to animal rights by trampling on human rights.

I do not oppose violence simply because it is counterproductive. I oppose it because it betrays animal rights philosophy. Those who resort to such tactics really have not understood that animal rights is about the extension of moral concern to all sentient beings--humans obviously included.

For if animals are God's creatures, we have no absolute rights over them, only the duty to look after them as God would look after them. To stand with Jesus is to reject our view of ourselves as gods and lords of creation. We are to honor life for the sake of the Lord of life.