Rights Quotes

If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.

Abraham Lincoln

Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.

Thomas Jefferson

Some people can't see miracles when they're right in the middle of them. Better than seeing miracles that don't exist. You're determined to stand entirely alone, aren't you? That's where I've always stood.

Orson Scott Card

Why so many of us a million years ago purposely knocked out major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be we were trying to to give evolution a shove in the right direction -- in the direction of smaller brains.

Kurt Vonnegut

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not stakes. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting FOR THE RIGHT is DOING nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.

Henry David Thoreau

Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.

Ambrose Bierce

With me, nothing goes right. My psychiatrist said my wife and I should have sex every night. Now, we'll never see each other!

Rodney Dangerfield

I wish the first word I ever said was the word quote, so right before I die I could say unquote.

Steven Wright

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.

Henry David Thoreau

The theory of rights enables us to rise and overthrow obstacles, but not to found a strong and lasting accord between all the elements which compose the nation.

Giuseppe Mazzini

Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.

Friedrich Nietzsche

He didn't know if he had the right or not. Didn't know if he was taking like a Red man, just what the land offered, or stealing like a White man, murdering whatever it pleased him to kill.

Orson Scott Card

A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit. A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states.

Vaclav Havel

Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

Thomas Jefferson

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.

Thomas Jefferson

Why are you killing me for your own benefit? I am unarmed.' 'Why, do you not live on the other side of the water? My friend, if you lived on this side, I should be a murderer, but since you live on the other side, I am a brave man and it is right.

Blaise Pascal

Not to the extent of throwing up my hands and saying, Well, it's all over. No. I think whichever generation and at whatever time, when the time comes, the generation that is there, I think will have to go on doing what they believe is right.

Ronald Reagan

There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.

Neil Gaiman