Individual Rights Quotes

The Bible and its teachings helped form the basis for the Founding Fathers' abiding belief in the inalienable rights of the individual, rights which they found implicit in the Bible's teachings of the inherent worth and dignity of each individual. This same sense of man patterned the convictions of those who framed the English system of law inherited by our own Nation, as well as the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. ~ Ronald Reagan

There is really only one proper function: the protection of individual rights. ~ Ayn Rand

The problem with today's world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it.
The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense! ~ Brian Cox

It should go without saying that even the most narrowly construed eminent-domain power would violate individual rights. Either a person owns his legitimately acquired property or he does not. ~ Sheldon Richman

But if the individual is to sacrifice a measure of personal liberty within the social contract, then individual rights must be guaranteed by law. Thus, it has been said that, in law, rights are the fence an individual erects around himself for protection against his neighbors.
How absurd such a posture must seem from a worldview in which the individual emerges out of the society, rather than the other way around. ~ F. David Peat

Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers. ~ John Ashcroft

A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Say what you will about Americans, but one thing they are not is passive. The Bush administration may have pushed through the Patriot Act weeks after 11 September, but, as the American public got to grips with how the law was affecting their individual rights, their protests grew loud and angry. ~ Heather Brooke

Despots are elected and deposed.
Laws are passed and repealed.
Nations rise and fall.
Individual liberty is eternal. ~ A.E. Samaan

Those Russkies won't put up with your whining and bellyaching for one second. I believe in freedom and individual rights as well as the next man but nobody has the right to live here and do nothing but run us down. ~ Fannie Flagg

I do believe that it was through divine providence that the Founding Fathers drafted a document that created a government that didn't trust each other - hence the separation of powers. And then, to close the deal, the Bill of Rights was added to continue to protect individual rights and freedoms. ~ John Shimkus

The United States presents a value system to the world that is based on democracy, based on economic freedom, based on individual rights for men and women, .. I think that is what makes us such a draw for nations around the world. People come to the United States to be educated, to become Americans. We are a country of countries and we touch every country, and every country in world touches us. ~ Colin Powell

As far as the earth is from the stars, and fire from the sea, so is the useful from the right. Power over men perishes completely if justice begins to be observed, and respect for individual rights overcomes strongholds. ~ Lucan

The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny. ~ Gerry Spence

Just as, in the case of love, children acquire, via the continuous experience of 'maternal' care, the basic self-confidence to assert their needs in an unforced manner, adult subjects acquire, via the experience of legal recognition, the possibility of seeing their actions as the universally respected expression of their own autonomy. The idea that self-respect is for legal relations what basic self-confidence was for the love relationship is already suggested by the conceptual appropriateness of viewing rights as depersonalized symbols of social respect in just the way that love can be conceived as the affectional expression of care retained over distance. [...] What is required are conditions in which individual rights are no longer granted disparately to members of social status groups but are granted equally to all people as free beings; only then will the individual legal person be able to see in them an objectivated point of reference for the idea that he or she is recognized for having the capacity for autonomously forming judgments. ~ Axel Honneth

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote. A majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority. The political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities, and the smallest minority on earth is the individual. ~ Ayn Rand

But what I believe is that if a person's individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don't issue mandates to businesses that you've got to do this and you've got to do that. ~ Clarence Thomas

America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less. ~ Ayn Rand

Freedom, liberty, individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them, is critical to me. ~ Jimmy Wales

I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred. ~ A.E. Samaan

Although I strongly believe in individual rights and the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit, I also recognize that public health and public safety are extremely important in our society. Certain communicable diseases have been largely eradicated by immunization policies in this country. We should not allow those diseases to return by forgoing safety immunization programs for philosophical, religious or other reasons when we have the means to eradicate them. ~ Ben Carson

As citizens, we knew we had ceded some of our individual rights to society in order to live together as a community. But we did not believe this social contract included support for an immoral system. Since the people invested government with its authority, we understood that we had to obey the law. But when law became suppressive and tyrannical, when human law violated divine principles, we felt it was not only our right, but our duty to disobey. As Henry Thoreau strongly believed, to comply with an unjust system is to accept abuse. It is not the role of the citizen to follow the government down a path that violates his or her own conscience. ~ John Lewis

If the entire society was conscious of its duties, nobody would need to fight for their individual rights. Since everybodys's rights would be automatically taken care of through someone else's duties. ~ Amish Tripathi

Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: "I'll do as I please at everybody else's expense." An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man - his own and those of others. ~ Ayn Rand

Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid. ~ Penn Jillette

It's a hard thing to legislate. You can't legislate good taste and you can't put a number on it in terms of square footage. It's a question of where individual rights end and community rights begin. ~ Ann Robinson

On Election Day, we select our representatives by secret ballot, and we choose our candidates based on their ability to protect our individual rights, not the rights of the group of people with which we most closely identify. ~ Andrew P. Napolitano

If instituted, the TPP's IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you're ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs. ~ Julian Assange

I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights. ~ Clarence Thomas

It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age. ~ James Mackintosh

I support the right of the individual, the right of the most individuals to get what they want. That is all majority rule is: support for the highest number of individuals to get their way. Really, in choosing to honor the wishes of the highest number of individuals, I support individual rights far more than those who oppose majority rule do. ~ Robert Peate

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. ~ Ayn Rand

Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression "individual rights"? is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression "collective rights"? is a contradiction in terms. ~ Ayn Rand

French sought reforms before liberties ... They hate, not certain specific privileges, but all distinctions of classes; they would insist upon equality of rights in the midst of slavery. They respect neither contracts nor private rights; indeed, they hardly recognize individual rights at all in their absorbing devotion to the public good ... They conceived all the social and administrative reforms effected by the Revolution before the idea of free institutions had once flashed upon their mind ... Most of them were strongly opposed to deliberative assemblies, to local and subordinate authorities, and to the various checks which have been established from time to time in free countries to counterbalance the supreme government ... French nation is prepared to tolerate in a government, that favors and flatters its desire for equality, practices and principles that are, in fact, the tools of despotism. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Individualism regards man - every man - as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights - and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members. ~ Ayn Rand

A basic component of individual rights is the right to own property. ~ Russell Shorto

Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society. ~ Lawrence Kohlberg

Tenets of a viable 21st century conservatism

1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.

2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.

3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.

4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.

6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor.

7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.

8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.

9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.

10. The government, local and distal, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.

11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.

12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual p ~ Jordan B. Peterson

The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence. ~ Ron Paul

The rights of children as individuals begin while yet the remain the fetus ... I hold abortion to be just as much murder as the killing of a person after birth is murder. ~ Victoria Claflin Woodhull

The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula "I am we"; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an "individual," existing apart from his group. ~ Erich Fromm

The error I found in the philosophy of Henry George was its cocksureness, its simplicity, and the small value that it placed upon the selfish motives of men. The doctrine was a hang-over from the seventeenth century in France, when the philosophers had given up the idea of God, but still thought that there must be some immovable basis for man's conduct and ideals. In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If 'natural rights' means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception. ~ Clarence Darrow

A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference. ~ Thomas Jefferson

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept 'just a few controls' is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government's unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States. ~ Ayn Rand

The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified. ~ Steven Pinker

If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down. ~ B.F. Skinner

I believe it was Napoleon who first sensed the ease with which, in modern society, the illusion of freedom can be created by strategic relaxation of regulations and law on individual thought, provided it is only individual, while all the time fundamental economic and political liberties are being circumscribed. The barriers to the kind of power Napoleon wielded as emperor are not individual rights so much as the kinds of rights associated with autonomy of local community, voluntary association, political party. These are the real measure of the degree to which central political power is limited in a society. Neither centralization nor bureaucratized collectivism can thrive as long as there is a substantial body of local authorities to check them ~ Robert A. Nisbet

Still - and for all Obama's heavy hinting to the contrary - Islam has no "human rights." The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect. ~ Ilana Mercer

Capitalism is based on individual rights - not on the sacrifice of the individual to the 'public good' of the collective. ~ Ayn Rand

In going too far, they [presidents] have taken away the individual rights of American citizens. ~ Dick Durbin

One thing I fear, that you Americans will do the same thing that you did after the last war. I mean that you will pull out of here and leave Europe, then Russia will have her way. Private enterprise and individual rights will be lost just as much as under a Nazi government. Frightful! ~ Hjalmar Schacht

I still totally believe in individual rights and individual responsibility and in choosing to do good. ~ Neil Peart

In pure Capitalism (never fully achieved even in America), the government's only role is to protect individual rights, property, and transactions from force or fraud by others via the police and/or courts and to protect the nation and its citizens against foreign aggression via the military. Period. As imperative as it is to understand morality, immorality, and amorality it is vital to understand that capitalism is the only social-political-economic-moral system that protects the individual from all force and fraud, including force or fraud from the government itself. ~ Alexandra York

I believe in individual rights so much that I don't like any sort of 'what's good for the cause'-type questions. ~ Penn Jillette

If succeeding generations of Americans don't understand the concepts of justice, individual rights, free enterprise, capitalism, sovereignty or national security, there can be no guarantee that those concepts - or others like them - will continue. ~ George Nethercutt

First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others. ~ Michael J. Sandel

The government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires. ~ Antonin Scalia

We need to insist on fathers and mothers sharing the care of their offspring as well as the opportunity to enjoy the fulfillment of individual rights. ~ Mary Frances Berry

Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper. ~ Larry Flynt

Legally speaking, the term 'public rights' is as vague and indefinite as are the terms 'public health,' 'public good,' 'public welfare,' and the like. It has no legal meaning, except when used to describe the separate, private, individual rights of a greater or less number of individuals. ~ Lysander Spooner

The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud ... to protect men from foreign invaders ... to settle disputes among men according to objective laws ... The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly. ~ Ayn Rand

The social model of the Bolsheviks failed, as will any model that denies individual rights, intellectual freedom, and freedom of competing political parties. Without these freedoms and rights, there is no motivation for people to work. Such a system cannot be sustained, especially in light of the technological revolution of the information era. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today. ~ Thurgood Marshall

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights; it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is man's deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written. ~ Ayn Rand

By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments ... The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments-that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity. ~ John Hospers

The simple truth hit Shiva: if the entire society was conscious of its duties, nobody would need to fight for their individual rights. Since everybody's rights would be automatically taken care of through someone else's duties. Lord Ram was a genius! ~ Amish Tripathi

Political [or individual] rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will be meet with the violent resistance of the populace ... One compels respect from others when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being ... The people owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today, in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength ~ Rudolf Rocker

Statism is political fashion.
Individual liberty is eternal. ~ A.E. Samaan

Norms appearing in the form of law entitle actors to exercise their rights or liberties. However, one cannot determine which of these laws are legitimate simply by looking at the form of individual rights. Only by bringing in the discourse principle can one show that each person is owed a right to the greatest possible measure of equal liberties that are mutually compatible. ~ Jurgen Habermas

Angela Davis's legacy as a freedom fighter made her an enemy of the state under the increasingly neoliberal regimes of Nixon, Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover because she understood that the struggle for freedom was not only a struggle for political and individual rights but also for economic rights. ~ Henry Giroux

I'm concerned about the role the court will play in protecting individual rights in this and the next century. ~ Dianne Feinstein

The political Right likes to champion individual rights and individual liberty, but it has also worked to enforce morality in relation to abortion, gambling, and homosexuality. ~ Dave Brat

Any group or "collective," large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the "rights" of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking ... A group, as such, has no rights. ~ Ayn Rand

We talk a lot about individual rights, but in fact Americans are very willing to give up our individual rights if it means our property values will be protected, and so on. ~ Robert D. Kaplan

If you're too stupid to understand that a philosophy that favors a federally structured republic , with numerous restraints on the scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic , and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should use this rule of thumb: If someone isn't advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn't assume he's a Nazi and you should know it's pretty damn evil to call him one. ~ Jonah Goldberg

If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America - even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles. ~ Alberto J. Mora

It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. ~ Ayn Rand

Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights. ~ A.E. Samaan

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god - Society, The State, The Government, The Commune - must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is. ~ Rose Wilder Lane

When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights a government is men's deadliest enemy. ~ Ayn Rand

My main quarrel with liberalism is not that liberalism places great emphasis on individual rights - I believe rights are very important and need to be respected. The issue is whether it is possible to define and justify our rights without taking a stand on the moral and even sometimes religious convictions that citizens bring to public life. ~ Michael Sandel

My office has been one of the most scrupulous in the country with regard to the protection of individual rights. I've been on record for years in law journals and books as championing the rights of the individual against the oppressive power of the state. ~ Jim Garrison

The one thing man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by a World Government, a New World Order. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Legally speaking, there are no such things as 'public rights,' as distinguished from individual rights. Legally speaking, there is no such creature or thing as 'the public.' ~ Lysander Spooner

To Bruce Lee, philosophy was not the professional playground of academics, but every human being's gateway to the greatest adventure of the human spirit. It illuminated the frontiers of human possibility and obliterated the shadows of doubt and insecurity. Unlike others, content to follow, Bruce Lee insisted upon charting his own course toward truth, and he encouraged those who wished to share his insights to do likewise. While Lee was a champion of individual rights and individual development, both of which stress the sovereignty of the individual as an end in himself, he also spoke to something deeper - the commonality of all human beings and the removal of such artificial barriers to true brotherhood as nationality, ethnicity, and class structure, so that human beings could live together peaceably as independent equals. Bruce Lee rejected blind obedience to ~ Bruce Lee

But, although America cannot be justly charged with violating the rights of Turkey, Turkey nevertheless can be justly charged with violating the rights of America. ~ Gerrit Smith

Three year sof unconditional MFN have not lead to any subtantial improvement in human rights, trade and nuclear proliferation practice of the Chinese government. In addition to the trade barriers, China has marred our trade relationship wit prison labor or export and other unfair trade practices. ~ Nancy Pelosi

Singing with others is an unmediated, shared experience as each person feels the same music reverberating in their individual bodies. Singing is part of our humanity; it is embodied empathy. ~ Jay Griffiths

In all human transactions, the highest degree of assurance to which we can arrive, short of the evidence of our own senses, is that of probability. The most that can be asserted is, that the narrative is more likely to be true than false; and it may be in the highest degree more likely, but still be short of absolute mathematical certainty. Yet this very probability may be so great as to satisfy the mind of the most cautious, and enforce the assent of the most reluctant and unbelieving. If it is such as usually satisfies reasonable men, in matters of ordinary transaction, it is all which the greatest sceptic has a right to require; for it is by such evidence alone that our rights are determined, in the civil tribunals; and on no other evidence do they proceed, even in capital cases. ~ Simon Greenleaf

Bashir's comments were well-planned, typed into a teleprompter, and approved by an entire production team before being broadcast to his millions of few viewers. But the women of MSNBC, including feminist heroine Rachel Maddow, never uttered a word of criticism. Neither did the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, or a host of other organizations claiming to fight for the rights of women everywhere. ~ Katie Pavlich

When people go within and connect with themselves, they realize they are connected to the universe and they are connected to all living things. ~ Armand DiMele

At the end of the day, only what we do for Christ will last. Appreciate each day, one another, and the vessels God may use to acknowledge our individual and collective skillsets and let's always remember the importance of planting seeds in our own lives, i.e., investing in ourselves and our spiritual purpose. If we can achieve this, we will be able to reflect on the journey and see the legacy we have built for our loved ones and the blessings we have sewn for God's glory. ~ Lorna Jackie Wilson

I have always been very interested in landscape ... I find that all natural forms are a source of unending interest - tree trunks, the growth of branches from the trunk, each finding its own individual air-space. ~ Henry Moore

We make her bear and raise our children
And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen
We tell her, home is the only place she should be
Then we complain that she's too
unworldly to be our friend ~ John Lennon

One of the goals of life is to try and be in touch with one's most personal themes-the values, the ideas, styles, colors that are the touchstones of one's own individual life, its real texture and substance. ~ Gloria Vanderbilt

A totalitarian system leaves behind it a minefield built into both the country's social structure and the individual psychology of its citizens. And mines explode each time the system faces the danger of being dismantled and the country sees the prospect of genuine renewal. ~ Anatoly Sobchak

I can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it - but I can never be on the inside of it with you. I cannot even be sure whether I really know what it is like. Is it 'like' my own? Or incomparable? Just as I can never know if what you see at any given moment is exactly the same as what I see. We look at a colour. We both call it red. But it is only because we have been taught to call it by that name. There is no guarantee - not ever - that we see it in the same way, that your red is my red. ~ Andre Brink

Empathy in broadest sense refers to the reactions of one individual to the observed experiences of another ~ Mark H. A. Davis

All you need i love then you can go anywhere and do anything... But i don't have that...
I need somebody to love... but i can't find that...
I never fealt true love... but i want to have someone to talk to and hug, to kiss and to love... But i can probably never find someone like that... If i had someone like this i would never feel sick i would never feel down and i would never need to cry and to doubt... If i found this person then surerly they'd be... My savior from hatreed and misery....

That is what i am searching for... But something i would never find... Even if one like that was out there, we would never collide...

Nice guys finish last, thats what they say right? That must mean i'm the nicest guy in the world...

I don't care much for sex, for freedom or for rights ... All i want is love even if you are in are in doubt, a man like this exist, and he is searching for a love that he'll most likely never find. ~ The Nicest Guy

In times of war, the law falls silent.
Silent enim leges inter arma ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero