Rights Freedom Quotes

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights. ~ Thomas Sowell

I am not interested in having freedom from burdens.
I don't need any authority to free me from responsibility.
I am not interested in having freedoms within an authoritarian's parameters.
I am only interested in self-determination.
I have only respect for liberty as I am a libertarian. ~ A.E. Samaan

The androcentric, patriarchal cultures, whatever you want to call it, are quite new. So, every economic statement should start with reproduction, not production. Every statement for human rights ought to include reproduction as a basic human right, like freedom of speech. ~ Gloria Steinem

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights. ~ Desmond Tutu

Come, all ye lovers of liberty, break the oppressor's rod, loose the iron grasp of mobocracy, and bring to condign punishment all those who trample under foot the glorious Constitution and the people's rights. ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

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 behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group. ~ Ron Paul

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. ~ Abe Fortas

Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with ... ~ Gerard K. O'Neill

Personally, when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true. I think either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all. Personally I lean towards unlimited rights, I feel for instance I have the right to do anything I please, BUT! If I do something you don't like I think you have the right to kill me. ~ George Carlin

Those religions that are oppressive to women are also against democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression. ~ Taslima Nasrin

We all would like to see a brighter future for Haiti, and I hope this conference will serve to explore many views. Respect for human rights, freedom, and the rule of law must be established in the poorest nation in our hemisphere. ~ Eliot Engel

A freedom given up is not so easily regained. ~ Rivera Sun

Few people understood the exceptional role the civil rights movement had on the white boys and girls of the South. Bill Clinton would never have become who he was without the shining example of Martin Luther King. The same is true of Jimmy Carter and Fritz Hollings and Richard and Joe Riley. Imagine this: you're a little white kid and you watch firehoses turned on people who don't seem to be hurting anyone, and fierce dogs being tuned on young men who carry signs about freedom. We white kids grew up watching movies and TV and guess what we had learned to do? We had learned to tell the good guys from the bad guys. ~ Pat Conroy

She would never let anyone interfere with her right to use her mind. ~ Laurel Corona

For as long as I can remember, I've always been interested in issues of social justice, political freedom, and civil rights. ~ Jennifer Chiaverini

After publishing The Age of Reason as an old man, Paine was beaten and turned out of his house and away from his town by his fellow citizens to punish him for blasphemy. I had, even then, a little glimmer of how dangerous it actually is for an American to behave like an American. We've never believed a word we've said from the Bill of Rights onward. What conceivable right to we have to feel smug about the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie by fanatical foreigners? We don't do badly with fatwas ourselves. ~ Bill Holm

It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. ~ William J. Brennan Jr.

The American experience influenced my understanding of individuality, basic human rights, freedom of expression and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. ~ Ai Weiwei

The Constitution may have been written with a feather; it should not be taken lightly... ~ Nanette L. Avery

Japan and Australia share the universal values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and fundamental human rights. ~ Shinzo Abe

Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. ~ Liu Xiaobo

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

Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Liberty is freedom constrained only by our responsibility to respect the equal rights of others. ~ Dave Champion

The freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. ~ Mercedes Lackey

Your gender may not help to make me feel comfortable; but I will absolutely defend your right to live in a way that doesn't require you to make me feel comfortable. Your skin colour may not be my skin colour; but I will absolutely defend your right to live in your own skin just as much as I live in mine. Your religion or absence of any religion may not align with my own beliefs; but I will absolutely defend your right to believe in anything or nothing at all. Since I'm a human too, I will defend your birthright to be the kind of human that you are. ~ C. JoyBell C.

The current Human Rights Commission's working group is made up of the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. No, I'm not making that up. ~ Andrew Sullivan

Never let anyone make you feel inferior for being who you are. When you live the life you were meant to live, in freedom and dignity ~ Desmond Tutu

I'm looking for freedom with a side of restraining order, but everything just comes with bacon. ~ Sarah Cross

A Jesus had to be crucified because he was an alive man. He must have called in his childhood, "Jesus, don't be befooled by others." And he was not befooled, so others had to crucify him, because he was not part of the game. Socrates had to be poisoned and killed, Mansoor had to be murdered. These are people who have escaped from the prison, and whatsoever you say you cannot persuade them to come back. They will not come into the prison. They have known the freedom of the open sky. ~ Rajneesh

Once you give up rights, they're not going to give them back. ~ Aaron McGruder

I'd like to make something about someone who hasn't existed so that I don't have to tread so carefully and can feel a little bit more creative freedom. ~ Sam Taylor-Johnson

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up. ~ Neil Gaiman

The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way. ~ Pankaj Mishra

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue. ~ Richard Flanagan

I am not delicate.
I am skinny dipping at 2am;
I am dancing naked under the full moon and playing in the mud.
I am the reverberating echoes of a curse word ricocheting off the steeply sloping mountain you thought I couldn't climb;
I am bare skin in the deepest depths of winter; I am the song of courage, and the melody of freedom you long to sing.
I am a fearless mother.
I am a passionate lover; a devoted friend.
I am the healer, the witch, the nurturing of your wounds.
I am the heat of a wildfire, the rage of a storm.
I am strong.
Delicate things are pretty-cute, even.
But I am not delicate.
I am wild, fierce and unpredictable.
I am breathtaking.
I am beautiful.
I am sacred. ~ Brooke Hampton

It is now established by verifiable evidence that religion stultifies the brain and is the great obstacle in the path of intellectual progress.
The more religious a person is, the more he is steeped in ignorance and superstition, the less is his sense of moral responsibility. The more intelligent a person, the less religious he is. There is an old saying that 'where there are three scientists, there are two atheists.'
The countries whose governments are dominated by religion and religious institutions are the most backward. By the same token, the countries whose people are the most enlightened, and whose governments are based upon the principle of secularism - the separation of church and state - are the most progressive.
And let me tell you: When man is intellectually free, the progress he will make is beyond calculation. ~ Joseph Lewis

No one is inferior to no one. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while remaining open to the unknown, cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn't swallow freedom whole. ~ Esther Perel

He has done it. With Jesus, God's rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut. It's the door to the prison where we've been kept chained up. We are offered freedom: freedom to experience God's rescue for ourselves, to go through the open door and explore the new world to which we now have access.
In listening to Jesus, we discover whose voice it is that has echoed around the hearts and minds of the human race all along. ~ N. T. Wright

They, and we, are the legacies of an unbroken chain of proud men and women who served their country with honor, who waged war so that we might know peace, who braved hardship so that we might know opportunity, who paid the ultimate price so that we might know freedom. ~ Barack Obama

It doesn't matter what color, sex, religion, age, sexual orientation, etc., everyone should have the same freedoms and liberties. ~ Lance Bass

True freedom is when you are the one deciding the value that your minute or hour is creating ~ Sunday Adelaja

Our work has only begun. In our time we have an historic opportunity to shape a global balance of power that favors freedom and that will therefore deepen and extend the peace. And I use the word power broadly, because even more important than military and indeed economic power is the power of ideas, the power of compassion, and the power of hope. ~ Condoleezza Rice

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

We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake
Pancakes! Pancakes!
that we never learn to respect. ~ Donald Antrim

It was on the day, or rather the night, of 27 June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden ... I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious. ~ Edward Gibbon

The observation turned into insight for LEGO. The company, says Smith- Meyer, had fallen into the trap of thinking that play habits had changed, and that LEGO must change with them. Not at all. Kids just wanted freedom to experiment on their own with the plastic bricks and to build something masterful. Or as Smith-Meyer puts it, "LEGO takes time. ~ Anonymous

This stunning act of humble love resulted not from Jesus's forgetting who he was but from remembering who he was. This was the holy mission of the Son Savior. He had to be willing to enter the lowest human condition, to do the most debased thing, and to let go of his rights of position in order that we might be redeemed. It was a high and holy calling, and it was the only way. ~ Paul David Tripp

It's important to remember that peace, liberty and freedom changes many aspects in our thoughts as far as life is concerned. ~ Auliq Ice

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions. ~ Todd Gitlin

Freedom is the inherent strength of a compassionate involved in acts of kindness and evolved in a constant training of flexibility. There's no free spirit in a rigid body as only a mind with open willingness to change cannot get caught in a trap. ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

When you become a sannyasin, I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else ... I am destroying your ideologies, creeds, cults, dogmas, and I am not replacing them with anything else. ~ Rajneesh

There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Free. He was free. He thought his brothers gave him that, and they did. At the same time, they didn't. True freedom came from Tabby. ~ Kristen Ashley

The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The legislation of the government has been directed rather to the protection of the rights of money and property than to the best good of the citizen. ~ Susette La Flesche

I am in cage. I wish to be free. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude. ~ Geoffrey Fisher

Humility is the freedom to stop trying to be what we're not, or pretending to be what we're not, and accepting our 'appropriate smallness. ~ John Ortberg

My anxious recollections, my sympathetic feeling, and my best wishes are irresistibly excited whensoever, in any country, I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom. ~ George Washington

Mind dissolves only when you don't choose. And when there is no mind, you are for the first time in your crystal clarity, for the first time in your original freshness. For the first time your real face is encountered. Mind is not there - the divider. Now existence appears as one. Mind has dropped; the barrier between you and existence is no more. Now you can look at existence with no mind. This is how a sage is born. With the mind - the world. With no mind - freedom, MOKSHA, KAIVALYA, NIRVANA. Cessation of the mind is cessation of the world. ~ Rajneesh

More than any USDA rule or regulation, this transparency is their best assurance that the meat they're buying has been humanely and cleanly processed. "You can't regulate integrity," Joel is fond of saying; the only genuine accountability comes from a producer's relationship with his or her customers, and their freedom "to come out to the farm, poke around, sniff around. If after seeing how we do things they want to buy food from us, that should be none of the government's business." Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology. ~ Michael Pollan

What it comes down to for me is that I'd rather us make bad decisions as a group, than to live in the absence of freedom. ~ Blake Crouch

The United States' administrations ... must recognize that Iran is a big power. Having said that, we consider ourselves to be a human force and a cultural power and hence a friend of other nations. We have never sought to dominate others or to violate the rights of any other country. ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

There is such a thing as perfection ... and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth ... Each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. Everything that limits us we have to put aside. ~ Richard Bach

If government were less important in our lives, politicians would have fewer goodies to trade. In return, we'd have more money and more freedom. ~ John Stossel

Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves. ~ Thomas Moore

Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom. ~ Rabindranath Tagore