Jimmy Carter Quotes

Moral principles of liberty that endow a person with the right to claim and acquire property at the same time oblige that person to respect every other person’s equal right to do the same.

To affirm my own rights I must define and affirm the rights of others.

One man’s right is every man’s right.

I fundamentally believe in freedom and human rights.

Let no one doubt, we will defend America's security and the cause of freedom around the world. But we want a president who tells us what America is fighting for, not just what we are fighting against. We want a president who will defend human rights - not just where it is convenient - but wherever freedom is at risk - from Chile to Afghanistan, from Poland to South Africa

It is the inalienable right of all to be happy.

The respect for human rights is one of the most significant advantages of a free and democratic nation in the peaceful struggle for influence, and we should use this good weapon as effectively as possible.

This is the beginning of a social movement in fact and not in pronouncements. We seek our basic, God - given rights as human beings...We shall do it without violence because it is our destiny. To the growers and to all who oppose us, we say the words of Benito Juarez: 'Respect for another's right is the meaning of peace.'

There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.

No practice or tradition trumps the human rights that belong to all of us.

Everyone has an equal and absolute right to sovereignty over his own body, his own property, and his own life, and to pursue his own happiness in any way that he chooses. No one has the authority to grant rights to anyone else, because human beings already possess all natural rights at birth. These rights include both personal and economic freedoms, and the only way they can be lost is if someone takes them away by force. The only right that an individual does not naturally possess is the right to violate someone else's liberty.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.

Tolerance and human rights require each other.

When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city...

Let us take care of our rights and we therein take care of our prosperity. Slavery is ever preceded by sleep

America was the first country in history to be founded on, people have rights. Not the divine right of kings, not the emperor's a god, or idolized, or we have to do what the dear leader says. And, expressly, that it's a system of equal rights, and then governments are instituted to secure those rights.

Freedom must be continually guarded as something more priceless than life itself.

There's this kind of almost - kind of a weird kind of elitism that says well maybe - maybe certain people in certain parts of the world shouldn't be free; maybe it's best just to let them sit in these tyrannical societies. And our foreign policy rejects that concept. And we don't accept it. And so we're working.

...Conservatives have excellent credentials to speak about human rights. By our efforts, and with precious little help from self-styled liberals, we were largely responsible for securing liberty for a substantial share of the world's population and defending it for most of the rest.

America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.

Wherever people defend the rights of the individual, I stand with them above all, over and beyond any wishes relating to how an economy should be managed or how people should govern themselves. This is a very strong commitment on my part.

Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.

San Francisco can start right now to become number one. We can set examples so that others will follow. We can start overnight. We don't have to wait for budgets to be passed, surveys to be made, political wheelings and dealings ... for it takes no money ... It takes no compromising to give the people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.

There is no country... where there are not somewhere lovers of freedom who look to this country to carry the torch and keep it burning bright until such time as they may again be able to light their extinguished torches at our flame. We owe it not only to our own people but to the world to preserve our soul for that.

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.