Natural Rights Quotes

Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge any one to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws. ~ Calvin Coolidge

How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we may now expect to see, not only in theory and in books but in actual practice, calculated for the general good, and taking no more upon it than the general good requires, leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with men's notions concerning God, and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine. ~ Joseph Priestley

White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. ~ Zadie Smith

The First Amendment, he explained, exposed tolerance as a sham, because tolerance implies one superior group of people deigning to put up with their inferiors. "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights," Washington wrote. "For, happily, the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." Of ~ Sarah Vowell

The true natural rights of men, then, are equal justice, security of labor and property, the amenities of civilized institutions, and the benefits of orderly society. ~ Russell Kirk

In crafting the Constitution, the Founders emphasized process, not results. If we follow the Constitution, we won't have a perfect society, which is unattainable by imperfect humans. But we will provide opportunity for people to use their natural rights to pursue the acquisition of property and their personal happiness. The results may yield sharp inequalities of income, but the process will guarantee chances for almost everyone. ~ Burton W. Folsom Jr.

Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind, the supreme being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beatifying that existence. He endowed him with rational faculties, by the help of which, to discern and pursue such things, as were consistent with his duty and interest, and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty, and personal safety. ~ Alexander Hamilton

There is no right to a job or a wage rate, but there is a right to move from one country to another in search of a better life. This is the point of view of Thomas Jefferson, John Locke and other great supporters of the natural rights tradition in America. ~ Alex Tabarrok

The "pursuit of happiness" is such a key element of the "American (ideological) dream" that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: "We holds 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." Where did the somewhat awkward "pursuit of happiness" come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property - the latter was replaced by "the pursuit of happiness" during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves' right to property. ~ Slavoj Zizek

Legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties. ~ Thomas Jefferson

[The] prevailing reason at this time is, that the Act of Parliament is against the Magna Charta, and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void. ~ Thomas Hutchinson

Therefore, states are equal in natural rights. ~ William H. Seward

Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a social right. ~ James Madison

Man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual's capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

[O]ur rules can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The Founders believed, and the Conservative agrees, in the dignity of the individual; that we, as human beings, have a right to live, live freely, and pursue that which motivates us not because man or some government says so, but because these are God-given natural rights. ~ Mark R. Levin

The electronic spectrum is the only natural resource in which there's no such thing as private property rights. You can't own a piece of the spectrum. ~ Adrian Cronauer

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . .

Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . .

The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . .

Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities ~ Russell Kirk

The story of humanity can be written as the struggle to acknowledge all human beings as human beings. ~ J.S.B. Morse

The rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right. ~ Thomas Jefferson

What, then, do they want a government for? Not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion, not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man
to protect person and property
to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak
in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not to be allowed to do more. ~ Herbert Spencer

The very idea of law originates in men's natural rights. There is no other standard, than natural rights, by which civil law can be measured. Law has always been the name of that rule or principle of justice, which protects those rights. Thus we speak of natural law. ~ Lysander Spooner

They who plead an absolute right cannot be satisfied with anything short of personal representation, because all natural rights must be the rights of individuals; as by nature there is no such thing as politic or corporate personality; all these things are mere fictions of law, they are creatures of voluntary institution; men as men are individuals, and nothing else. They, therefore, who reject the principle of natural and personal representation, are essentially and eternally at variance with those who claim it. As to the first sort of reformers, it is ridiculous to talk to them of the British constitution upon any or upon all of its bases; for they lay it down that every man ought to govern himself, and that where he cannot go himself he must send his representative; that all other government is usurpation; and is so far from having a claim to our obedience, it is not only our right, but our duty, to resist it. ~ Edmund Burke

When most people use the word 'freedom' nowadays, they use it in the sense of the French Revolutionaries: freedom from tradition, from established social institutions, from religious doctrines, from prescriptive duties. I think that this employment of the word does much mischief. For we do not live in an age - and there are such ages - which is oppressed by the dead weight of archaic establishments and obsolete custom. The danger in our era, rather, is that the fountains of the great deep will be broken up and that the pace of alteration will be so rapid that generation cannot link with generation. Our era, necessarily, is what Matthew Arnold called an epoch of concentration. Or, at least, the thinking American needs to turn his talents to concentration, the buttressing and reconstruction of our moral and social heritage. This is a time not for anarchic freedom, but for ordered freedom. There are much older and stronger concepts of freedom than that espoused by the French Revolutionaries. In the Christian tradition, freedom is submission to the will of God. This is no paradox. As he that would save his life must lose it, so the man who desires true freedom must recognize a providential order which gives all freedoms their sanction. The theory of 'natural rights' depends upon the premise of an on alterable human nature bestowed upon man by God. Only acceptance of the divine order can give enduring freedom to a society; for this lacking, there is no reason why the strong and th ~ Russell Kirk

Some other natural rights ... [have] not yet entered into any declaration of rights. ~ Thomas Jefferson

[If you understood the natural rights of mankind,] [y]ou would be convinced that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that, and cannot be wrested from any people without the most manifest violation of justice. ~ Alexander Hamilton

As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilization, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I am in everything that stands for justice and the natural rights of free men everywhere.I am American Amaranth ~ J.R. Ortiz

I consider the war of America against Britain as the country's war, the public's war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property. ~ Thomas Paine

Natural rights, nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, elevated nonsense, nonsense going on stilts. ~ John Stuart Mill

Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature ... Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind. ~ Alexander Hamilton

A natural right in the strict sense is that which is naturally under a person's control, his body with its faculties of movement, feeling, thought, and speech. By extension, a natural right is what a person brings under his control without violating any other person's natural rights. ~ Frank Van Dun

Nothing in the Constitution of the United States gives the Congress or the Executive Branch the power to attempt the task of regulating climate, as impossible as that would be under any realistic scenarios. No national security emergency exists relative to climate that would warrant increased governmental control of energy production. Today's Americans have an obligation to future Americans to elect leaders who do not believe in an omnipotent government but believe, as did the Founders, in limited government, and in the preservation of liberty and the natural rights of the people. ~ Harrison Schmitt

From a biological viewpoint, patriarchal religion denied women the natural rights of every other mammalian female: the right to choose her stud, to control the circumstances of her mating, to occupy and govern her own nest, or to refuse all males when preoccupied with the important business of raising her young. ~ Barbara G. Walker

All ... natural rights may be abridged or modified in [their] exercise by law. ~ Thomas Jefferson

How idle is this prating about natural rights as though still containing all that had been forfeited. ~ Jefferson Davis

Voting, the be all and end all of modern democratic politicians, has become a farce, if indeed it was ever anything else. By voting, the people decide only which of the oligarchs preselected for them as viable candidates will wield the whip used to flog them and will command the legion of willing accomplices and anointed lickspittles who perpetrate the countless violations of the people's natural rights. Meanwhile, the masters soothe the masses by assuring them night and day that they - the plundered and bullied multitudes who compose the electorate - are themselves the government. ~ Robert Higgs

I grew up in a family that despised not only communism but collectivism, socialism, and any 'ism' that deprived the individual of his or her natural rights. ~ Rand Paul

Everybody is satisfied, that a conservation and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society; and that therefore all forms whatsoever of government are only good as they are subservient to that purpose to which they are entirely subordinate. Now, to aim at the establishment of any form of government by sacrificing what is the substance of it; to take away, or at least to suspend, the rights of nature, in order to an approved system for the protection of them ... is a procedure as preposterous and absurd in argument as it is oppressive and cruel in its effect. ~ Edmund Burke

And these great natural rights may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man's natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense. ~ William Blackstone

The thing about rights is they're not actually supposed to be voted on. That's why they're called rights. ~ Rachel Maddow

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

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense - nonsense upon stilts. ~ Jeremy Bentham

The principles on which we engaged, of which the charter of our independence is the record, were sanctioned by the laws of our being, and we but obeyed them in pursuing undeviatingly the course they called for. It issued finally in that inestimable state of freedom which alone can ensure to man the enjoyment of his equal rights. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others. Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection. ~ Thomas Paine

And if at whiles the bubble, blown too thin,
Seem nigh on bursting, - if you nearly see
The real world through the false, - what do you see?
Is the old so ruined? You find you 're in a flock
O' the youthful, earnest, passionate - genius, beauty,
Rank and wealth also, if you care for these:
And all depose their natural rights, hail you,
(That 's me, sir) as their mate and yoke-fellow,
Participate in Sludgehood ~ Robert Browning

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

If two individuals enter into a contract to commit trespass, theft, robbery or murder upon a third, the contract is unlawful and void, simply because it is a contract to violate natural justice, or men's natural rights. ~ Lysander Spooner

English political sagacity is compounded of instinctive reactions to immediate situations and a wisdom, gained by cumulative experience, which guides instinct through the complexities, intricacies and imponderabilities of modern politics. The most typical social philosopher of England is not John Locke but Edmund Burke. Constitutional government may have found its first justification in the rationally elaborated theories of "rights" in the philosophy of the former. But the actual history of constitutionalism in England has been dominated by the logic expressed in the philosophy of the latter. The Englishman trusts not in the abstract "natural rights" dictated by reason, but the "English rights" which are guaranteed to him by his own history. ~ Reinhold Neibuhr

Why do you allow yourselves to be shut up?'

'Because it cannot be helped as they are stronger than women.'

'A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests. ~ Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Ours is a representative republic with a Constitution in which is recognized the natural law and the natural rights of man. It is a republic with a spiritual foundation characterized by freedom - freedom for the individual and for his society. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing. ~ Albert J. Nock

Government exists to protect the product of men's labor, their property, and therewith life and liberty. The notion that man possesses inalienable natural rights, that they belong to him as an individual prior, both in time and in sanctity, to any civil society, and that civil societies exist for and acquire their legitimacy from ensuring those rights, is an invention of modern philosophy. Rights, like the other terms discussed in this chapter, are new in modernity, not a part of the common-sense language of politics or of classical political philosophy." from "Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, Andrew Ferguson ~ Allan Bloom

The Constitution doesn't give us rights: it restrains government from infringing on rights we acquire at birth by virtue of being human beings, "natural rights" that are held by "natural persons." The Constitution holds back (restraining government) rather than gives forward (granting rights to people). ~ Thom Hartmann

We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off. ~ John Trudell

The most viable method of elaborating the natural-rights statement of the libertarian position is to divide it into parts, and to begin with the basic axiom of the "right to self-ownership." The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to "own" his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference. Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

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

These our great natural rights we keep to ourselves; we will not have them tampered with; respecting them we give to you no commission whatsoever. ~ Caleb Cushing

Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolate. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture. ~ William Blackstone

Everyone has an equal and absolute right to sovereignty over his own body, his own property, and his own life, and to pursue his own happiness in any way that he chooses. No one has the authority to grant rights to anyone else, because human beings already possess all natural rights at birth. These rights include both personal and economic freedoms, and the only way they can be lost is if someone takes them away by force. The only right that an individual does not naturally possess is the right to violate someone else's liberty. ~ Robert Ringer

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

Natural rights are those which always appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the rights of others. ~ Thomas Paine

Our political and constitutional rights, so called, are but the natural and inherent rights of man, asserted, carried out, and secured by modes of human contrivance. ~ Gerrit Smith

[I]t is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or of any number of men, at the entering into society to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights, when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are life, liberty, and property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up an essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right of freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave. ~ Samuel Adams

The exercise of natural rights has no limits but such as will ensure their enjoyment to other members of society. ~ Marquis De Lafayette

Harming one's unalienable rights in order to serve justice is injustice. ~ J.S.B. Morse

A human being has no natural rights of any nature. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a mad-man, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic knight of the sorrowful countenance. ~ Edmund Burke

We were born with natural rights. We don't need civil rights. [African-Americans] don't need civil rights. They don't need them. They have inalienable rights granted by God in the Constitution. I mean, I'm discriminated against all the time. I don't care. It doesn't bother me. [I'm discriminated against] because I'm old. I'm too old to get a job as a game show host. They say, well, the guy's 71 and in five years he'll be 76. And I'm a one per center, and I'm absolutely discriminated against as a one per center. ~ Chuck Woolery

The rights of men, that is to say, the natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things; and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure, even if no charter at all could be set up against it. If these natural rights are further affirmed and declared by express covenants, if they are clearly defined and secured against chicane, against power, and authority, by written instruments and positive engagements, they are in a still better condition: they partake not only of the sanctity of the object so secured, but of that solemn public faith itself, which secures an object of such importance ... The things secured by these instruments may, without any deceitful ambiguity, be very fitly called the chartered rights of men. ~ Edmund Burke

In speaking of natural rights, therefore, it is essential to remember that these alleged rights have no political force whatsoever, unless recognized and enforced by the state. ~ Charles Edward Merriam

My evanescent anarchistic tendencies are purely classical. I use the word anarchist in the sense in which it was understood by the ancient Greeks. They, of course, accepted the anarchist as a fairly respectable--if somewhat vehement--opponent of government encroachment on the individual's rights to think and act freely. It is in this sense that I glimpse myself as an anarchist--regretting the growth of government and the ever-increasing trend toward regulation and, worst of all, standardization of human activity. ~ J. Paul Getty

We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism. ~ Howard Zinn

The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids. ~ Dan Savage

Are you such a dreamer To put the world to rights? I'll stay home forever Where two and two always makes a five I'll lay down the tracks Sandbag and hide January has April's showers And two and two always makes a five It's the devil's way now There is no way out You can SCREAM and you can shout It is too late now Because ... You have not been Payin' attention! Payin' attention! Payin' attention! Payin' attention! You have not been paying attention! ~ Thom Yorke

Being different is ... interesting; there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme ... well, then, reality tends to fade away. ~ Edward Albee

Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life. ~ Charles Bukowski

In a free and democratic society such as ours, justice should not eternally abrogate one's rights to freedom and liberty, except in the most extreme cases. ~ Bernard B. Kerik

The Good Friday Agreement and the basic rights and entitlements of citizens that are enshrined within it must be defended and actively promoted by London and Dublin. ~ Gerry Adams

In Turkey the religious minorities have more rights than they do in Europe. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones. ~ Jules Verne

In the general election, Nixon refined Goldwater's southern strategy. Unlike Goldwater, who "ran as a racist candidate," Nixon said, the 1968 GOP nominee campaigned on racial themes without explicitly mentioning race. "Law and order" replaced "states' rights." Pledging to weaken the enforcement of civil rights laws replaced outright opposition to them. Nixon "always couched his views in such a way that a citizen could avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal," said his top aide, John Ehrlichman. ~ Ari Berman

The natural inclination in all humans is to posit a force, a spirit, outside of us. That tendency toward superstitious magical thinking is just built into our nature. ~ Michael Shermer

Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights. ~ Noam Chomsky

I wouldn't be a very good hunter without these glasses. I'm not a very good hunter with these glasses, but I'd be even worse without them, so that would put a crimp in how many kids I could have, so all of these medical advances have at least in some parts of the world blunted natural selection. ~ Carl Zimmer

If the world is the product of nothing but natural forces and natural law, divine intervention is impossible. ~ Titus Lucretius Carus

I also turn to homeopathic remedies for the treatment of indigestion, travel sickness, insomnia and hay fever just to name a few. Homeopathy offers a safe, natural alternative that causes no side effects or drug interactions. ~ Cindy Crawford

Oh, oh, I'm so sorry I just forgot that what I ask it can not be answered why??
You don't the rights to answer it, you don't have the guts, you are afraid aren't you? ~ Deyth Banger

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary. ~ William Hazlitt

Behjet eased the horse forward again. "The harvest is failing. There will be no crop at all if this rain doesn't stop - not even hay."
The rain. The rain she'd been so grateful for, the rain that concealed the warping of her shadow. It was going to kill people. ~ Erin Bow

The answer to 1984 is 1776 ~ Alex E. Jones

In fact, books are still being published by the lunatic fringe with the same explanation. In case this book should be read by some fundamentalist searching for straws to prop up his prejudices, let me state categorically that all my experience (such as it is) has led me to an unqualified acceptance of evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for what I have seen in the fossil record. ~ D. V. Ager

I believe that it is girls' human rights to go to school to be educated, minimum, until they are 18. ~ Guler Sabanci

People are told their rights when they're arrested. Consumers getting collection letters are entitled to the same courtesy. ~ Gary Weiss

The good news is that you already know how to love yourself; you've just forgotten. You were actually born in love with yourself; it's your natural state. Think back to yourself as a little girl, to a moment when you remember being carefree and open to the wonder of the world, a moment when your light was superbright, before anyone told you to dim it down. ~ Christine Arylo

It's not simply that communists are atheists and want to stamp out religion; it's that they cannot tolerate anyone who worships a King who stands above the kings of this world. For that higher allegiance gives a basis for demanding freedom and rights from the earthly king.49 ~ Charles W. Colson

Reacher said nothing. We can't fight thirty people. To which Reacher's natural response was: Why the hell not? ~ Lee Child

A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself. ~ Jacques Monod

We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I've come to believe we're integrating into a burning house.
I'm afraid that America may be losing what moral vision she may have had ... . And I'm afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.