Rights Quotes - Page 113

It is never easy to define what is moral, particularly in foreign policy. But at the risk of being simplistic, it appears to me that a foreign policy that is morally right protects human rights everywhere.

The First Amendment freedom of religion is as important today as when the Bill of Rights was first written.

I will help the good fight continue until that long awaited moment arrives, when our rights are equal and when the political limits on love have been smashed.

Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men havethe same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable.

You know, civil rights is great and everything, but a lot of people don't realize that plumbers in the South make less money than when they used to install separate drinking fountains.

You cannot understand the politics of today without understanding the Civil Rights Movement and the role it played in our society.

Is driving a right? You are entitled to a driving license if you can abide by the traffic laws and drive responsibly. If your driving endangers the lives of others, that license will be taken away from you. So rights and responsibilities are inseparable. If you can't respect the rights of others, if by your belief and conduct you endanger the lives of other people, you are not entitled to any right.

I have an intellectual inclination for democratic institutions, but I am instinctively an aristocrat, which means that I despise and fear the masses. I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy....liberty is my foremost passion. That is the truth.

[In the event of war, Americans would] resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe they, at length, become willing to run the risk of being less free.

To all general purposes we have uniformly been one people each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection.

The protection of human rights to promote the dignity of the individual is too important a matter for symbolic gestures alone. It is only through the pursuit of practical and effective efforts to promote human rights that we show our real commitment to the welfare of individuals and society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralisation of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

[There is] a duty in refusing to cooperate in any undertaking that violates the Constitutional rights of the individual. This holds in particular for all inquisitions that are concerned with the private life and the political affiliations of the citizens.

Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.

Either you can subscribe to the American creed which says that God endowed us with our rights, or you can subscribe to the abortion creed which says that those rights are the consequences of our mother's will.

I warn the marauder dragging plunder, chaotic, rich beyond all rights: he'll strike his sails, harried at long last, stunned when the squalls of torment break his spars to bits.

Success on the front of women's rights will look like a world not only with obvious advances - where no girl is denied access to education, for instance - but also one with more subtle changes in how we regard gender and gender stereotypes.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most sweeping civil rights legislation of its day, and included women's rights as part of its reforms. Ironically, the section on women's rights was added by a senator from Virginia who opposed the whole thing and was said to be sure that if he stuck something about womens' rights into it, it would never pass. The bill passed anyway, though, much to the chagrin of a certain wiener from Virginia.

What people in Burma need is a democratic federal Burma that guarantees autonomy, rights and protection for all, regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion or race.

I don't believe that military intervention is always the right approach. What we need is a comprehensive strategy, one that advances democratization, economic reforms and equal rights for women.

We [Americans] have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.

The Constitution is a radical document... it is the job of the government to rein in people's rights.

The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans.

The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old "laissez faire" school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval.

It's absurd. We would all like to see Cuba move toward civil society and free markets and greater respect for human rights. But the U.S. policy is exactly the wrong way to go about it.