Rights Quotes

None can love freedom heartily but good men - the rest love not freedom but licence.

~ John Milton

One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth.

~ Henrik Ibsen

I understand by 'freedom of spirit' something quite definite - the unconditional will to say No where it is dangerous to say No.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Man was born free and everywhere he is in shackles.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

~ George Bernard Shaw

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

~ Adlai Stevenson

For two decades the state has been taking liberties and these liberties were once ours.

~ E. P. Thompson

By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think wrong.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

~ Eric Hoffer

Liberty as it is conceived by current opinion has nothing inherent about it it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behaviour.

~ Mary Mccarthy

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

~ Hubert Humphrey

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

~ Philip Wylie

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must like men undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

~ Thomas Paine

Let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill that we shall pay any price bear any burden meet any hardship support any friend oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

~ John F. Kennedy

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Send these the homeless tempest toss'd to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

~ Emma Lazarus

To be truly free it takes more determination courage introspection and restraint than to be in shackles.

~ Pietro Bellusch

Equality of opportunity is an equal opportunity to prove unequal talents.

~ Viscount Samuel

The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong.

~ Harry Weinberger

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way.

~ Viktor Frankl

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest no domination. We seek no indemnities for ourselves no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely give. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and freedom of nations can make them.

~ Woodrow Wilson

A free man is as jealous of his responsibilities as he is of his liberties.

~ Cyril James

Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.

~ Baron De Montesquieu

Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart the gods are powerless against him.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Equality is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.

~ Hannah Arendt

When you have robbed a man of everything he is no longer in your power. He is free again.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The effect of liberty on individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations.

~ Edmund Burke

We are in bondage to the law in order that we may be free.

~ Cicero

People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have for example freedom of thought instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.

~ Soren Kierkegaard

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.

~ Pat Conroy

It is more informative how we treat things with no defined legal rights, than how we treat things with legal rights.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I detect the activist returning with a vengence.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

~ James Madison

Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman and usually they are sure there is one handy.

~ Louis L'amour

You have no right to be silenced.

~ James Devita

What about my rights? What about a person's privacy? Did all that just go to hell after 9/11?

~ Keith Ablow

I have not stopped water when it should run. I have not made a cutting in a canal of running water.

~ Alvin A. Bullock

It is also aimed at experienced human rights activists who are looking for a handy collection of facts to use in any confrontations online – or in real life.

~ Christina Engela

To make a claim of ownership implies a claim against others. That is, others must refrain from interfering with your use of that thing. As such the very act of the body occupying its standing room is to make a claim against others because only one body can occupy the space at a time.

~ Daniel Alexander Brackins