This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There is a freedom greater even than the freedom conferred by citizenship and the possession of full human rights. It is the freedom of the soul - of the soul that "walks at liberty because it has sought God's precepts," that visualizes the best and strenuously aspires after it. The greatest of boons has still to be attained." - Morris Joseph
"The nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe - the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? ... Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us... Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you." - Abraham Lincoln
"The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time." - Jacques Maritain
"The institutions of a country depend in great measure on the nature of its soil and situation. Many of the wants of man are awakened or supplied by these circumstances. To these wants, manners, laws, and religion must shape and accommodate themselves. The division of land, and the rights attached to it, alter with the soil; the laws relating to its produce, with its fertility. The manners of its inhabitants are in various ways modified by its position. The religion of a miner is not the same as the faith of a shepherd, nor is the character of the ploughman so war-like as that of the hunter. The observant legislator follows the direction of all these various circumstances. the knowledge of the natural advantages or defects of a country thus form an essential part of political science and history." - Justus Möser
"Small crimes always precede great crimes. Whoever has been able to transgress the limits set by law may afterwards violate the most sacred rights; crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness." - Jean Racine, baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine
"Supporting the Equal Rights Amendment is like trying to kill a fly with a sledge hammer. You don’t kill the fly, but you end up breaking the furniture... We cannot reduce women to equality. Equality is a step down for most women." - Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly
"If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart wishes and plans; in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows. Now we are poor but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die, we die defending our rights." -
"It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned." - Charles Sumner
"Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority." - William Howard Taft
"A man who neglects his duty as a citizen is not entitled to his rights as a citizen." - Tiorio NULL
"The power of the majority... is not unlimited. Above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason; and in the political world, vested rights." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"When a child begins to move in the midst of the objects that surround him, he is instinctively led to appropriate to himself everything that he can lay his hands upon; he has no notion of the property of others; but as he gradually learns the value of things and begins to perceive that he may in his turn be despoiled, he becomes more circumspect, and he ends by respecting those rights in others which he wishes to have respected in himself. The principle which the child derives from the possession of his toys is taught to the man by the objects which he may call his own." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"The diploma gives society a phantom guarantee and its holders phantom rights. The holder of a diploma passes officially for possessing knowledge... comes to believe tht society owes him something. Never has a convention been created which is more unfortunate, for every one - the state, the individual (and, in particular, culture)." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
"A corporation cannot blush. It is a body, it is true; has certainly a head - a new one every year; arms it has and very long ones, for it can reach at anything... a throat to swallow the rights of the community, and a stomach to digest them! But who ever yet discovered, in the anatomy of any corporation, either bowels or a heart?" - Howel Walsh
"What is threatened today is moral liberty, conscience, respect for the soul, the very nobility of man. To defend the soul, its interests, its rights, its dignity, is the most pressing duty for whoever sees the danger." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy." - Roger Baldwin, fully Roger Nash Baldwin
"Equal rights for the sexes will be achieved when mediocre women occupy high positions." - Françoise Giroud
"A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Refusal to cooperate with the [hospital] psychiatrist, rather than being within his rights under the Fifth Amendment, may be construed as evidence of a “paranoid illness” for which [the patient] requires further psychiatric hospitalization." - Ron Leifer, fully Ronald Leifer
"In the field of modern cosmology, the first principle is called “the Cosmological Principle.” It says that the universe has no center, that it has the same properties throughout. Every place in the universe has, in this sense, equal rights. How can the human race, which has evolved in a universe of such fundamental equality, fail to strive for a society without violence and terror? How can we fail to build a world in which the rights due to every human being from birth are respected?" - Fang Lizhe
"Men have no special right because they belong to one race or another: the word man defines all rights." - José Martí, fully José Julián Martí Pérez
"The best way to teach our young people the meaning of our democratic freedoms is to demonstrate, by our own example, that we have mastered the 'three R's of citizenship' - Rights, Respects, and Responsibilities." - Earl James McGrath
"Why should we be willing to go by faith? We do all things in this world by faith in the word of others. by faith only we know our position in the word of others. by faith only we know our position in the world, our circumstances, our rights and privileges, our fortunes, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our age, our mortality. Why should Religion be an exception?" - John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman
"A gift confers no rights." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Almost all propaganda is designed to create fear. Heads of governments and their officials know that a frightened people is easier to govern, will forfeit rights it would otherwise defend, is less likely to demand a better life, and will agree to millions and millions being spent on “Defense.”" - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly
"Article 1 – All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." - United Nations NULL
"Attack another's rights and you destroy your own." - John Jay Chapman
"Respect for the rights of others means peace." - Benito Juárez , born Benito Pablo Juárez García
"When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Throughout human history, progress has come through the men and women who dared to challenge the precepts and dogmas that curtailed freedoms. Freethinking (which includes skepticism, rationalism, unbelief, atheism, agnosticism, humanism and so forth) has made great and lasting contributions to human freedom, human rights, and human equality." - Gerald Alexander Larue
"The authors of that notable instrument [the Declaration of Independence] intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal--equal with "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they said and this they meant." - Abraham Lincoln
"He who does not have the courage to speak up for his rights cannot earn the respect of others." - Rene G. Torres
"Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains his sense of duty." - Albert Camus
"It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, fully Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
"For the Founders, minorities are in general bad things, mostly identical to factions, selfish groups which have no concern as such for the common good... The Founders wished to achieve a national majority concerning the fundamental rights and then prevent that majority from using that power to over turn those fundamental rights. In 20th Century social science, however, the common good disappeared and along with it the negative view of minorities. The very idea of majority... is done away with in order to protect the minorities" - Allan Bloom, fully Allan David Bloom
"Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other." - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
"Human rights are the natural outgrowth of people becoming culturally and economically secure. As you become secure, you want to be freer." - Andrew Young, fully Andrew Jackson Young
"The individual freedoms destroyed by the increase in national authority have been in the main the freedom to deny black Americans their elementary rights as citizens, the freedom to work little children in mills... the freedom to pay starvation wages... the freedom to... pollute the environment - all freedoms that, one supposes, a civilized country can readily do without" - Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
"Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on man’s rights; he will rather have regard for everyone, forgive everyone, help everyone as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"If one wishes to advocate a free society - that is, capitalism - one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts." - Bayard Rustin
"If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases." - Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat