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 support and defend
them in the best manner they can.
-- Samuel Adams
The
USA was founded in the name of democracy, equality
and individual freedom, but is failing to deliver
the fundamental promise of protecting rights for all.
-- Amnesty International
"It
was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens;
nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole
people, who formed the Union... Men, their rights
and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing
less."
-- Susan
B. Anthony |
|
Thought
that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities,
of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing
of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism
and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major
delusions.
-- Alan Barth
Sometimes
the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus
the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger
that their acts would otherwise involve... But how
is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply.
See if the law takes from some persons what belongs
to them and gives it to the other persons to whom
it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen
at the expense of another by doing what the citizen
himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then
abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder;
this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability,
harmony and logic.
-- Frederic Bastiat
The
[Supreme] Court during the past decade let police
obtain search warrants on the strength of anonymous
tips. It did away with the need for warrants when
police want to search luggage, trash cans, car interiors,
bus passengers, fenced private property and barns.
-- Dan Baum
"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."
-- Mary Frances Berry (American Writer, b.1938)
An
unconditional right to say what one pleases about
public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum
guarantee of the First Amendment.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black
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.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
The
Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create"
rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights
to prohibit our Government from infringing rights
and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
-- Justice William J. Brennan
The
people never give up their liberties but under some
delusion.
-- Edmund Burke
Democracy
is not the law
of the majority but the protection of the minority.
-- Albert Camus
If
we don’t believe in freedom of expression
for people we despise, we don’t believe
in it at all.
-- Noam
Chomsky
|
|
|
|
Restriction
of free thought and free speech is the most
dangerous of all subversions. It is the one
un-American act that could most easily defeat
us.
-- Justice
William O. Douglas
|
A
people who extend civil liberties only to preferred
groups start down the path either to dictatorship
of the right or the left.
-- Justice
William O. Douglas
The
privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled
away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually,
each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed
as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite
unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government
may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s]
life.
-- Justice
William O. Douglas
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.
-- Frederick
Douglass
|
|
|
|
They
[the founders] proclaimed to all the world
the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights
of the common man. That doctrine has ever
since been the heart of the American faith.
-- Dwight
D. Eisenhower
|
The
right to freedom of expression is justified first
of all as the right of an individual purely in his
capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely
accepted premise of Western thought that the proper
end of man is the realization of his character and
potentialities as a human being.
-- Thomas I. Emerson
|
|
They
that can give up essential liberty to obtain
a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty
nor safety.
-- Benjamin
Franklin |
The
whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of
the right of the people at large or considered as
individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual
as unalienable and which consequently, no majority
has a right to deprive them of.
-- Albert Gallatin
Civil
liberties victories never stay won, but must be fought
for over and over again.
-- Ira Glasser
Make
men wise, and by that very operation you make them
free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this;
no usurped power can stand against the artillery of
opinion.
-- William Godwin
The
greatest right of a civilized person is to be left
alone, unless he does harm to others or is threatening
to do harm to himself.
-- Justice Arthur Joseph Goldberg
I
am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample
underfoot.
-- Horace Greeley
"With
every civil right there has to be a corresponding
civil obligation."
-- Edison Haines
In
a free government, the security for civil rights must
be the same as that for religious rights. It consists
in the one case in the multiplicity of interests,
and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.
-- Alexander Hamilton
|
|
None
of us would trade freedom of expression for
the narrowness of the public censor. America
is a free market for people who have something
to say, and need not fear to say it.
-- Hubert
Humphrey
|
The
first thing to learn in intercourse with others is
non-interference with their own particular ways of
being happy, provided those ways do not assume to
interfere by violence with ours.
-- William James
|
|
Bear
in mind this sacred principle, that though
the will of the majority is in all cases to
prevail, that will to be rightful must be
reasonable; that the minority possess their
equal rights, which equal law must protect,
and to violate would be oppression.
-- Thomas
Jefferson
|
"The
best principles of our republic secure to all its
citizens a perfect equality of rights."
-- Thomas
Jefferson
By
a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate
freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom
of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in
all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no
standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil
which no honest government should decline.
-- Thomas
Jefferson
Whenever
the people are well informed, they can be trusted
with their own government; that whenever things get
so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may
be relied on to set them to rights.
-- Thomas
Jefferson
I
would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending
too much liberty than to those attending too small
a degree of it.
-- Thomas
Jefferson
 |
I
believe in an America where the separation
of church and state is absolute -- where no
Catholic prelate would tell the president
(should he be Catholic) how to act, and no
Protestant minister would tell his parishoners
for whom to vote -- where no church or church
school is granted any public funds or political
preference -- and where no man is denied public
office merely because his religion differs
from the president who might appoint him or
the people who might elect him.
-- John
F. Kennedy
If
we make peaceful revolution impossible, we
make violent revolution inevitiable.
-- John
F. Kennedy
|
The
enlargement of liberty for individual human
beings must be the supreme goal and abiding
practice of any western society.
-- Robert
F. Kennedy |
 |
"When
the government violates the people's rights, insurrection
is, for the people and for each portion of the people,
the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible
of duties."
-- Marquis De Lafayette
It
is easy to think the State has a lot of different
objects -- military, political, economic, and what
not. But in a way things are much simpler than that.
The State exists simply to promote and to protect
the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.
A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple
of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man
reading a book in his own room or digging in his own
garden -- that is what the State is there for. And
unless they are helping to increase and prolong and
protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies,
courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste
of time.
-- C. S. Lewis
|
|
"The
Cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered
at the end of one, or even one hundred defeats."
-- Abraham
Lincoln |
I
believe there are more instances of the abridgment
of the freedom of the people by gradual and
silent encroachments of those in power than
by violent and sudden usurpations.
-- James
Madison |
 |
|
|
If
the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that
a state has no business telling a man, sitting
alone in his own house, what books he may read
or what films he may watch.
-- Thurgood
Marshall |
If
all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind
would be no more justified in silencing that
one person than he, if he had the power, would
be justified in silencing mankind.
-- John
Stuart Mill |
|
Of
the liberty of conscience in matters of religious
faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by
jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases;
of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the
right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are
well defined, and secured against encroachment, it
is impossible that government should ever degenerate
into tyranny.
-- James Monroe
The
busybodies have begun to infect American society with
a nasty intolerance -- a zeal to police the private
lives of others and hammer them into standard forms
-- A Nation of Finger Pointers.
-- Lance Morrow
Fascism
should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge
of state and corporate power.
-- Benito Mussolini
|
|
The
only way to make sure people you agree with
can speak is to support the rights of people
you don't agree with.
-- Eleanor
Holmes Norton
|
For
all men being originally equals, no one by birth
could have a right to set up his own family
in perpetual preference to all others for ever.
-- Thomas
Paine |
 |
|
|
I
knew someone had to take the first step and
I made up my mind not to move.
-- Rosa
Parks
|
All
of us can think of a book... that we hope none of
our children or any other children have taken off
the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that
book from the shelf -- that book I abhor -- then you
also have exactly the same right and so does everyone
else. And then we have no books left on the shelf
for any of us.
-- Katherine Patterson
Demanding
domestic security in times of war invites carelessness
in preserving civil liberties and the right of privacy.
Frequently the people are only too anxious for their
freedoms to be sacrificed on the altar of authoritarianism
thought to be necessary to remain safe and secure.
-- US Representative Ron Paul
In
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December
1948) in most solemn form, the dignity of a person
is acknowledged to all human beings; and as a consequence
there is proclaimed, as a fundamental right, the right
of free movement in search for truth and in the attainment
of moral good and of justice, and also the right to
a dignified life.
-- Pope John XXIII, 1881-1963 Pacem in Terris, 1963
Power
always has to be kept in check; power exercised in
secret, especially under the cloak of national security,
is doubly dangerous.
-- William Proxmire
|
|
"A
community is democratic only when the humblest
and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil,
economic, and social rights that the biggest
and most powerful possess."
-- A.
Philip Randolph
|
|
Those
who have long enjoyed such privileges as we
enjoy, forget in time that men have died to
win them.
-- Franklin
D. Roosevelt
|
|
The
'strength' of the People becomes weak when we don't
'exercise' our rights.
-- Eric Schaub
"From
the equality of rights springs identity of our highest
interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights
without striking a dangerous blow at your own."
-- Carl Schurz
We
must remember that a right lost to one is lost to
all.
-- William Reece Smith, Jr
Constitutional
rights may not be infringed simply because the majority
of the people choose that they be.
-- Supreme Court of the United States
|
|
There
will never be a really free and enlightened
State until the State comes to recognize the
individual as a higher and independent power,
from which all its own power and authority
are derived, and treats him accordingly.
-- Henry
David Thoreau
|
"Every
segment of our population, and every individual, has
a right to expect from his government a fair deal."
-- Harry S. Truman:
The
tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over
the rights of others, and then exercises its power
to change the laws in its favor.
-- Voltaire
I
may not agree with what you say, but to your death
I will defend your right to say it.
-- Voltaire
The
constitution does not provide for first and second
class citizens.
-- Wendell L. Wilkie
If
you mind your own business, you won't be minding mine.
-- Hank Williams
|
|
I
am where I am because of the bridges that I
crossed. Sojourner Truth was a bridge. Harriet
Tubman was a bridge. Ida B. Wells was a bridge.
Madame C. J. Walker was a bridge. Fannie Lou
Hamer was a bridge.
-- Oprah
Winfrey
|
See
also HUMAN RIGHTS Quotes
www.HumanRightsDay.us
www.CivilRightsDay.com
