Rights and Freedoms Quotes

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

Societies cannot move forward without law, and our constitution is the cornerstone of the law and our National Assembly is its umbrella and fortress.

Human rights are inscribed in the hearts of people; they were there long before lawmakers drafted their first proclamation.

I rejoice in having so favorable an opportunity of felicitating the State of Rhode Island on the co-operation I am sure to find in the measures adopted by the guardians of literature in this place, for improving the morals of the rising generation, and inculcating upon their minds principles peculiarly calculated for the preservation of our rights and liberties. You may rely on whatever protection I may be able to afford in so important an object as the education of our youth.

We do not want the peace of slaves nor the peace of the grave.

The demand for liberty is a demand for power, either for possession of powers of action not already possessed or for retention and expansion of powers already possessed.

Rights mean you have a right to your life. You have a right to your liberty, and you should have a right to keep the fruits of your labor....I, in a way, don’t like to use those terms: gay rights, women’s rights, minority rights, religious rights. There’s only one type of right. It’s the right to your liberty.

The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.

Even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people; so that there may be no interference with the right to worship, or with the security of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties by officials high or low; no restrictions on the freedom of men to seek education or work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may become all he is capable of becoming.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.

The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.

As long as you're a citizen of our country. As long as you're an American citizen, you're part of this populist, economic nationalist movement.

True rights, such as those in our Constitution, or those considered to be natural or human rights, exist simultaneously among people. That means exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another.

The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax

The absolutists of contract are the real parents of revolution.

As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.

There is a fundamental difference in the perspectives from which Islam and the West view the matter of human rights. The Western perspective may ... be called anthropocentric and the perspective of Islam is theocentric - God conscious... In essence, the believer has only obligations or duties towards God since he is called upon to obey the Divine Law. Paradoxically, in these duties lie all the rights and freedoms

During the first campaign, one of my jobs as my husband's spouse was to travel around the country and really listen to women. There were voices that were new to me: the voices of military spouses, many of them women, and veterans.... I was overwhelmed by their challenges, and the notion that we as a country don't even know that these women exist, because we live in a country where one percent of the population protects the rights and freedoms of the other 99 percent of us. I thought that if I had the opportunity to serve as First Lady, I was going to use this platform to be their voice.

The ADA was a landmark civil rights legislation. It was a bill of rights for persons with disabilities, a formal acknowledgement that Americans with disabilities are Americans first and that they're entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.