Famous Quotes & Sayings

Helen Thomas

Maybe the Jefferson case will give members of Congress second thoughts the next time they get ready to legislate away the rights of ordinary Americans.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them well.

Hans Rosling

My interest is not data, it's the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers.

Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa

Democracy is not just constitutional and legislative rules; it is a culture and practice and adhering by the law and respecting international human rights principles.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

John Marshall

In a free government almost all other rights would become worthless if the government possessed power over the private fortune of every citizen.

John Mayer

I went to my library, right? And I started to research the Bill of Rights and I did not technically find anything that said all Americans shall eat shrimp with whoever they like, but I found some things that are close enough to infer that I am within my legal rights to enjoy seafood with whomever I choose.

John Lewis

The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.

John Lennon

I was a working-class macho guy who was used to being served and Yoko didn't buy that. From the day I met her, she demanded equal time, equal space, equal rights.

George Mason

The question then will be, whether a consolidated government can preserve the freedom and secure the rights of the people.

George Mason

That all power of suspending laws, or the execution of laws, by any authority, without consent of the representatives of the people, is injurious to their rights, and ought not to be exercised.

Mona Simpson

The more you learn about animals and animal rights - it's an intriguing, fascinating world.

They didn't have the same rights as white people.

David McCullough

You have to have wisdom and knowledge as well as virtue to preserve your rights and liberties.

David Korten

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

Charlotte Bronte

Unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure—its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave forever.

Dick Durbin

We want to make certain that every American who stood in silent tribute to Rosa Parks hopes that the Sepreme Court Judge will break silence and speak out clearly for the civil rights that define our unity as a nation.

Edward Snowden

When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights.

Edward Snowden

Your rights matter, because you never know when you're going to need them.

Edward Kennedy

The Republican program is the profit-protection program for the insurance industry It's a bill of goods, it's a bill of wrongs. Ours is a patients' bill of rights.

Arthur Goldberg

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.

Chelsea Clinton

It just seems so fundamental to me. I'm able to marry the person I wanted to marry. That's the fundamental human imperative. Those of us who have been lucky enough should expand these rights to others.

Our thinking was that all of these rights had been secured.

Ayn Rand

Whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all.

Ayn Rand

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

Ayn Rand

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights...

Ayn Rand

One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living.

Ayn Rand

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

Ayn Rand

America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more-and nothing less. The rest-everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything 'noble and just,' and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history-was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.

Ayn Rand

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.

Jane Fonda

Almost 100 years after women secured the right to vote in 1920 through the 19th Amendment, we still do not have equal rights under the Constitution. My question for the GOP candidates: Do you support the Equal Rights Amendment?

Benjamin Disraeli

Poverty has its duties as well as its rights.

Calvin Coolidge

If the people lose control of the arteries of trade and the natural sources of mechanical power, the nationalization of all industry should soon be expected. Our forefathers were alert to resist all encroachments upon their rights. If we wish to maintain our rights, we can do no less.