The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create"
rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our
Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be
preexisting. ~Justice William J. Brennan, 1982
You
are a human being. You have rights inherent in that reality. You
have dignity and worth that exists prior to law. ~Lyn Beth Neylon
Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a
rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your
territory. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. ~Abraham Lincoln
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no
vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of
justice is no virtue. ~Barry Goldwater
By a divine
paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two. So in the
wonderful reciprocities of being, we can never reach the higher levels
until all our fellows ascend with us. ~Edwin Markham
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. ~Bishop Desmond Tutu, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs
Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself. ~Robert Ingersoll
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. ~Gandhi
And we who have toiled for freedom's law, have we sought for freedom's soul?
Have we learned at last that human right is not a part but the whole?
~John Boyle O'Reilly
It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away
than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home. ~Carl
T. Rowan
No man is above the law and no man below it. ~Theodore Roosevelt
Of equality - As if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and
rights as myself - As if it were not indispensable to my own rights
that others possess the same. ~Walt Whitman
I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way. ~Robert Frost
Silence never won rights. They are not handed down from above; they are forced by pressures from below. ~Roger Baldwin
If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they
are myths to which the republic is committed. ~Howard Mumford Jones
I have always claimed Americans didn't want a drink as bad as they
wanted the right to take a drink if they did happen to want one. ~Will
Rogers
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. ~Horace Greeley
Stancolumn