Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. Thomas Jefferson
All, too, will 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
Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man. Thomas Jefferson
A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their magistrate. Thomas Jefferson
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. US Declaration of Independence
For those who have made our own lives possible, those who have given us our traditions, they didn’t look back to find out what our color was or what our religion was or what our race was, they didn’t look that way to us. Robert Kennedy, South Africa June 1966
You talk about giving the people their rights as if you can make a present of their liberty, as a reward for services rendered. Citizen Kane 1941 starring Orson Welles & Joseph Cotten & Dorothy Comingore & Ray Collins & Paul Stewart & Everett Sloane & Agnes Moorehead et al, director Orson Welles
We declare our right on this Earth to be a man. To be a human being. To be respected as a human being. To be given the rights of a human being. In this society, on this Earth this day which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary. Malcolm X
Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.
Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight … Bob Marley, song 1973
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptibly rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense upon stilts. Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832, English philosopher
Right ... is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters. Jeremy Bentham
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. Jeremy Bentham
Folks, I hate to spoil your fun but there is no such thing as rights, OK? They’re imaginary, we made them up like the Boogie Man ... cute and fictional ... Where do they come from? ... If your rights came from God, He would have given you the right to some food every day, and He would have given you the right to a roof over your head – God would have been looking out for you. George Carlin
Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that ... They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that. Do you know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your social security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And do you know something – they’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ’cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club. And you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the big club! By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe ... what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people ... and these are people of modest means – who continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all. George Carlin, Who Really Controls America
The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labour and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education. Albert Schweitzer
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. Jane Addams
Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever. Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, 1768
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Ayn Rand
I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way. Robert Frost
Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Frederick Douglass
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. Edward R Murrow
Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them. Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. Robert A Heinlein, Starship Troopers
You have to remember, rights don’t come in groups; we shouldn’t have ‘gay rights’; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn’t have this major debate going on. It would be behaviour that would count, not what person belongs to what group. Ron Paul
Burst down those closet doors once and for all, and stand up and start to fight. Harvey Milk
It’s not my victory, it’s yours and yours and yours. If a gay can win, it means there is hope that the system can work for all minorities if we fight. We’ve given them hope. Harvey Milk
Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges. H L Mencken
This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism. Gloria Steinem
Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage. Lucille Ball
More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason – or are manipulated into reasoning – that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can’t be trusted. Robert Anton Wilson, The Eye in the Pyramid
Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? ...