Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.

I have a right to nothing, which another has a right to take away; and Congress will have a right to take away trials by jury in civil cases. Let me add, that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth.

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

I am a believer in liberty. That is my religion — to give to every other human being every right that I claim for myself, and I grant to every other human being, not the right — because it is his right — but instead of granting I declare that it is his right, to attack every doctrine that I maintain, to answer every argument that I may urge — in other words, he must have absolute freedom of speech.

The human's being right to do as he pleases without interfering with someone else's rights is a formula defining rights prior to social legislation.

I have a personal belief that you never have to give up liberty for security. You can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights.

There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?

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

Historically, the court has been the forum to which individuals can turn when they believed their constitutional rights were violated. This has been especially noteworthy in the arena of civil rights.

Whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all.

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.

As soon as I hear of a right, I want it.

The question is, not what rights naturally belong to man, but how they may be most equally and effectually guarded in society.

One of the greatest perils to an extensive republic is the disregard of individual rights.

America is very much about individual happiness, the right to expression, self-determination. In America you do need to point to harm befalls victims before you can limit someone else's rights.

Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law.

If we can't preserve the privacy of our right to procreate, I can't imagine what rights we will be able to protect.

Government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.

I believe marriage is a human right, not a state right.

If government can give you rights, government can take them away from you.

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.

Communities don't have rights. Only individuals in the community have rights.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.