Violation of Rights Quotes

Lust of power; the subjugation of inoffensive and law-abiding neighbors; autocratic aggrandizement, is the cause of this war. In its cause the allies have been guiltless.

We know of officers who develop inappropriate relationships with victims of domestic abuse. They have ignored their professional duty and their moral responsibility.

There are unquestionable violations of our Constitution.

The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.

When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them into signing fraudulent agreements that we called treaties which we never kept. We turned them into beggars on a continent that gave life for as long as life can remember. And by any interpretation of history, however twisted, we did not do right. We were not lawful nor were we just in what we did. For them, we do not have to restore these people, we do not have to live up to some agreements, because it is given to us by virtue of our power to attack the rights of others, to take their property, to take their lives when they are trying to defend their land and liberty, and to make their virtues a crime and our own vices virtues.

What right to 49 states have to punish the citizens of one state by dumping their garbage in that state without their consent.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

When somebody was looking in my locker, it was like going in my desk. Somebody happened to be looking in my locker when they shouldn't have been.

An innocent man is being degraded; an innocent man is being dishonored. Long live France. Long live the army.

Reading about people who were so truly voiceless and powerless - Liberian child soldiers, Sudanese refugees, and, especially, Kashmiri women whose husbands or sons were imprisoned by the army with no hope of release - made me think about how I would feel if someone took my brothers from me.

Attack another's rights and you destroy your own.

A wife is sold into the hands of her husband and must endure his embraces though she may have a hundred causes to hate and abominate him.

My primary school teacher once poured a bottle of curdled school milk forcefully down my throat. Then I threw it up all over her suede shoes. I'd rather have drunk from the spittoon in Barney's barber shop.

If the president were to displace from office a man whose merits require that he should continue in it… he will be impeachable by this House before the Senate, for such an act of mal-administration; for I contend that the wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject him to impeachment and removal from his own high trust.

Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty.

Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.

All should be free to worship their God without harm …. No one’s home [may] be destroyed and no one’s property be looted.

Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.

... the keynote of government is injustice.

I am outraged that a House member has tried through this provision to breach the traditional confidentiality of individual Americans' tax returns. There is no reason for this measure, and this last-minute act violates all principles of judgment and common sense.

To be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed and robbed; then, upon the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

People do not like being lied to, and they do not like having their rights violated. So as soon as [officials] stop making arguments, you see support for me starts to rise.

People should never be permitted to feel comfortable while trampling the rights of others.

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason... Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.