Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge any one to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.
Calvin Coolidge

Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.
Calvin Coolidge

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
Samuel Adams

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

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

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

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.
W. E. B. Du Bois

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