Quotes about Rights

Use your liberty in Christ to set others free, not to assert your own rights.

When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.

The institutions of black enslavement and white supremacy did not exist before Democrats in the South created them. The very same institutions then became the mechanisms that Democrats used to build their power, and also to repel and defeat attempts by Republicans to extend rights and opportunities to black Americans.

The Republican ethos underlying these landmark provisions was aptly framed by the great abolitionist Republican, Frederick Douglass. Douglass said, "It is evident that white and black must fall or flourish together. In light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion, and every right, privilege and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color."

This was the clarion cry taken up by the GOP in the aftermath of the Civil War. Virtually all the black leaders who emerged from that era were Republicans who supported the GOP's call to remove race as the basis of government policy and social action. Historian Eric Foner writes that black activists of the antebellum era embraced "an affirmation of Americanism that insisted blacks were entitled to the same rights and opportunities that white citizens enjoyed."

The Declaration of Independence does not mean we are equal in endowments, only in rights.

The earliest opponents of slavery in America were Christians, mostly Quakers and evangelical Christians. They took seriously the biblical idea that we are all equal in the eyes of God, and interpreted it to mean that no person has the right to rule another person without his consent.

Inequality of outcomes is not seen as a necessary evil that government should seek to remedy; rather, the government itself exists to guard citizens' right to accumulate unequal fortunes and property.

Content with their hardly-won triumphs, that worthy body of men seemed to rest upon their oars. In the plenary enjoyment of their rights of conscience, they forgot the great vital principles of their forefathers, and their own duties and responsibilities.

No one can take away the opportunity that you deserve.

The universe has no favourites; it is supremely just, and gives to every man his rightful earnings.

There can no longer be anyone too poor to vote.