The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.
Calvin Coolidge

The battle for women's rights has been largely won.
Margaret Thatcher

People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.
Indira Gandhi

All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.
Ron Paul

The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.
Ron Paul

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter - and to write it in the books of law.
Lyndon B. Johnson

All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary.
Andrew Jackson

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.
Andrew Jackson

I weep for the liberty of my country when I see at this early day of its successful experiment that corruption has been imputed to many members of the House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office.
Andrew Jackson

The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer... form the great body of the people of the United States, they are the bone and sinew of the country men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws.
Andrew Jackson

If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.
Mary Wollstonecraft

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.
Alexander Hamilton

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.
Arthur Schopenhauer

There are those who say to you - we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.
Hubert H. Humphrey

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. Mencken

The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.
J. Paul Getty

The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.
Victor Hugo

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
Victor Hugo

If the evens of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American - our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.
Jon Stewart

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.
Jimmy Carter