rights

"Any kind of civil rights movement in the Soviet Union would have been ruthlessly smashed. Obviously. There would have been nothing left of it in no time at all. Most people would never even hear about it."

"At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen."

"Civil Rights opened the windows. When you open the windows, it does not mean that everybody will get through. We must create our own opportunities."

""What threatens democracy is hunger, it is misery, it is the disease of those who have no resources to face it. These are the evils that can threaten democracy, but never the people in the public square in the use of their legitimate and democratic rights"."

"What white people learned from the Civil Rights era was how not to appear to be racists, even to themselves. They came away from the 1960s knowing that racism was a matter of using the wrong words or expressing the wrong attitudes publicly. They trained their internal monologues to mirror an egalitarian or deracinated public discourse: no slurs, just a continual stream of . That was the essence of white anti-racism: don't say the wrong thing."

"Some highly religious people are outraged that atheists would publicly declare their lack of faith. Accordingly many of the people who belong to atheist associations hide their beliefs from most others, knowing from experience it could affect their employment, membership in other clubs, and social connections. It reminds me of the reaction of many high RWAs when homosexuals began to come out: “Don’t these people know they’re supposed to be ashamed of what they are?” That in turn reminded me of the reaction of many White supremists to the civil rights movement: “Don’t these n------ know they’re inferior and should never be treated as our equals?” Fortunately, eventually, minorities can overcome these reactions."

"I believe the preservation of our civil liberties to be the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems, because it always has been with us and always will be with us and if we ever permit those liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation. They constitute the soul of democracy. I believe that there is grave danger in this country of losing our civil liberties as they have been lost in other countries."

"It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. … They...consequently are instruments of injustice. The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."

"Every segment of our population, and every individual, has a right to expect from his government a fair deal."

"[I]t seems to me that this past century has accomplished two Civil Rights movements. First, the right for blacks and Hispanics and people from all different nationalities to take their place in the middle of society and that has been achieved at great cost. It is a tremendous struggle in America, but now we think nothing of walking into an office and finding that a black person is the president of the company instead of a janitor cleaning the hallways. And then we learned that the talent that blacks and Hispanics have, always had, their intelligence, dedication and willingness to work is no less than anybody else. They have been able to persevere and finally I think we have really overcome tremendous amounts of prejudice, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The second great Civil Rights movement was equality for women. It started at the end of the last century. Women finally got to vote. We've gotten all the way to the point now where women aren't expected to stay home and just be mothers and it's okay to be a single parent and it's okay to go out and pursue your ambition and your dreams. And that's been a very important breakthrough because there are so many areas where women are more talented and have more to offer than men do. And now we are beginning to see everybody working side by side in society and in the workplace. But, there remains one HUGE minority that is still terribly discriminated against. And that population is the disabled population. And that comprises 1/5 of the world's population. In the United States, for example, we have 54 million disabled people and the thing that's very difficult is when blacks and Hispanics and women were fighting for equal rights there was a level of discomfort. But nothing approaching what happens when "normal" people look at the disabled and are uncomfortable. That is a prejudice that they MUST overcome because we're not in a position to always look our very best or to feel our very best, or to be pleasing to the eye because we have suffered terrible debilitating diseases and injuries. But what's happening now is the kind of discrimination that is so bad and I want to tell you that it exceeds any prejudice that ever occurred before in the previous civil rights movements."

"There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.""

"Thomas Jefferson was right in declaring that all human beings are created (or, or if you will, are by nature) equal. They are also, in terms of their individual differences, unequal in the varying degrees to which they possess the species-specific potentialities common to all. These individual inequalities, when they are recognized as subordinate to the basic equality of all human beings in their common humanity or specific nature, do not generate difficulties that must be overcome or eradicated in order to increase social justice."

"Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace."

"There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong–to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights."

"To those who say, 'My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights', I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say? To those who say that, 'this civil-rights program is an infringement on states' rights'? I say this, The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights."

"Secession was required to preserve slavery. Why should non-slaveholders care? Because slavery was the will of God, and those who opposed the institution–the abolitionists–were by definition anti-God. More to the point, secession was necessary to preserve white supremacy, to avoid a race war, and to prevent racial amalgamation. For Southerners to remain in the Union, be they slave-owners or non-slave-owners, meant losing their property, their social standing, and the 'sacred purity of our daughters'. Tariffs appear nowhere in these sermons and speeches, and 'states' rights' are mentioned only in the context of the rights of states to decide whether some of their inhabitants can own other humans."

"While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states' rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle."

"Is the United States going to decide, are the people of this country going to decide that their Federal Government shall in the future have no right under any implied power or any court-approved power to enter into a solution of a national economic problem, but that that national economic problem must be decided only by the States?… We thought we were solving it, and now it has been thrown right straight in our faces. We have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce."

"I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man's rights, that each community, as a State, has a right to do exactly as it pleases with all the concerns within that State that interfere with the right of no other State, and that the general government, upon principle, has no right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things that does concern the whole."

"To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all."

"You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.""

"I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of states rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union."

"No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass."

"For right is right, since God is God, And right the day must win; To doubt would be disloyalty, To falter would be sin."

"We cannot speak of [civil or natural] rights without centering our attention on [the moral compass of] conscience, one among a few distinctive features that make humans human‒and humane."

"Be sure you are right, then go ahead."

"Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion."

"We live in a world where rights multiply every single day, and everything seems to have rights. Today, rights are the products of imagination, social consensus, even ideology and power. Each group that has the practical force to impose itself upon society can claim to have established one or more new rights, to which everyone has then to bow. Those who don’t are denounced as backward-looking."

"The expression “human rights” did not always exist. It started being used in 17th-century Europe. We could even speculate on the fact that the use of the expression “human rights” increased proportionally to the loss of clarity on what those rights were and are, as if simply repeating the formula could fill the void. Prior to the introduction of the expression “human rights,” Western culture spoke of “natural rights.” The genealogical process leading from natural rights to human rights is an interesting subject to explore. Interestingly, that genealogy also surfaces in documents of the UN beyond the “Declaration.” But if—again—the argument I am proposing is meaningful, the point here is that the substitution of “natural” with “human” created a serious problem."

"The rule of the road is a parodox quite, If you drive with a whip or a thong; If you go to the left you are sure to be right, If you go to the right you are wrong."

"Sir, I would rather be right than be President."

"A right is based on the interest which figures essentially in the justification of the statement that the rights exits. The interest relates directly to the core right and indirectly to its derivatives. The relation of core and derivative rights is not that of entailment, but of the order of justification."

"He will hew to the line of right, let the chips fly where they may."

"Imagine if a government agency could get away with violating your constitutional rights simply by denying it was acting as the government. It seems absurd, but that is what has attempted to avoid liability after it sanctioned a professor [Dr. Norman Wang] for criticizing racial preferences in an article in a prestigious academic journal."

"Once a nation ceases to respect the source of human dignity, it will soon stop respecting the rights that dignity demands."

"Rights are grand things, divine things, in this world of God; but the way in which we expound those rights, alas! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas! alas! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous, divine world than his own rights!"

"But 'twas a maxim he had often tried, That right was right, and there he would abide."

"The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right."

"Those closest, and so most accountable, to the people are best positioned to protect their rights."

"Away with private wrongs! We'll not go forth To fight for these — but for the rights of men."

"As citizens, individuals are entitled to affirm their rights. Rights are not just mere ideals, abstract concepts, or values. Values need to be translated in active policies with rigorous standards of political life."

"Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can."

"If instead of insisting on rights everyone does his duty, there will immediately be the rule of order established among mankind. There is no such thing as the divine right of kings to rule and the humble duty of the ryots to pay respectful obedience."

"Civilization no longer represents the conscience of the individuals who must find therein their work. The facts and forces which now organize industry and so-called justice, violate the best instincts of mankind. ... Without regard to his conscience, the economic system involves a man in the guilt of the moral and physical death of his brothers: their blood cries to him from the adulterated and monopolized foods he eats; from the sweat-shop clothes he wears; from his educational advantages, his special privileges, his social opportunities. ... Civilization denies to man that highest of all rights — the right to live a guiltless life, the right to do right."

"The real lesson of [archbishop Óscar] Romero is that there are no legitimate reasons to deny [civil or natural] rights. His government in his time believed that [civil or natural] rights could be somewhat “suspended” to protect El Salvador from Communist influences coming from the Soviet Union via Cuba and Nicaragua. Romero was certainly not an admirer of the Soviet Union, but believed there should be other ways of protecting his country, not suspending [civil or natural] rights. He taught us that those who advocate for [civil or natural] rights are “for” their countries, not “against” them. …Romero wrote that religious persecution happens because “truth is always persecuted,” and that God blesses those who protest and fight for freedom. But they should know they should suffer, because “pain is the money that buys freedom.” …Romero’s key teaching, that there is no reason good enough to justify the violation of [civil or natural] rights, is relevant for both religious liberty and the Tai Ji Men case. There are governments that claim that limiting religious liberty is necessary to protect social stability or the harmony of the country. Romero’s message is that this is [no] valid justification. [Civil or natural] rights protection defines what a legitimate social stability is, rather than the other way around."

"Social justice without [civil or natural] rights is [maliciously] ideological and false."

"In a now-well-known 2022 article, legal scholar and poet Charilaos Nikolaidis has argued that rights are not only legal instruments but also poetic creations. In his theory of the “poetry of rights,” he reminds us that rights possess aesthetic, emotional, and symbolic qualities. They are more than clauses in a statute or articles in a treaty; they are verses in humanity’s collective poem. Rights inspire, resonate, and move us beyond the technicalities of law into the realm of imagination. They allow us to envision justice as duty and dream, as enforcement and beauty. Rights, Nikolaidis suggests, are powerful because they are both rational and emotional, both functional and symbolic. They carry the power to inspire, mobilize, and transform."

"Nothing can be permitted to the few ; rights and advantages were sent for all ..."

"Qui jure suo utitur neminem tedit."

"If inequalities stare us in the face the essential equality too is not to be missed. Every man has an equal right to the necessaries of life even as birds and beasts have. And since every right carries with it a corresponding duty and the corresponding remedy for resisting any attack upon it, it is merely a matter of finding out the corresponding duties and remedies to vindicate the elementary fundamental equality."