Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

But we must create in each person a sense of responsibility in order that each one of us can have the right to enjoy all his rights.

People have increasingly come to regard the government as a source of rights rather than as a defender of pre-existing individual rights.

… nearly universal is a never-ending effort to balance the rights of individuals with the needs that, in the modern world, it seems only government can meet.

It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.

Freedom & Duty always go hand in hand and if the free do not accept the duty of social responsibility, they will not long remain free.

We also need to find a language capable of defending government as an element of the common good, one that does not define itself as both a punishing and corporate state. This is not merely a matter of redefining sovereignty, but also rethinking what is distinctive about the social state, social responsibility, and the common good.

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

But without a caring society, without each citizen voluntarily accepting the weight of responsibility, government is destined to grow even larger, taking more of your money, burrowing deeper into your lives.

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.

The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.

In giving rights to others which belong to them, we give rights to ourselves and to our country

The state is therefore everyone; the rules within the state are laws which safeguard the welfare of all and which must originate from the welfare of all.

Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility.

The equal rights of man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.

Where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place, and life and property are his who can take them.

We've placed a lot of emphasis in this country on the idea of people's rights. That's how it should be, but it makes no sense to talk about rights without also talking about responsibilities.

The rights of man as the foundation of just Government had been long understood but the superstructures projected had been sadly defective

Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a "free" man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual.

By assigning his political rights to the state the individual also delegates his social responsibilities to it: he asks the state to relieve him of the burden of caring for the poor precisely as he asks for protection against criminals. The difference between pauper and criminal disappears - both stand outside society.

The stability of the State depends upon the readiness of every citizen to subordinate his rights to those of the rest.

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

The democratic principle, enunciated in the words of the Declaration of Independence, declared that government was secondary, that the people who established it were primary. Thus, the future of democracy depended on the people, and their growing consciousness of what was the decent way to relate to their fellow human beings all over the world.