This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, fully Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
Allan Bloom, fully Allan David Bloom
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
Andrew Young, fully Andrew Jackson Young
Human rights are the natural outgrowth of people becoming culturally and economically secure. As you become secure, you want to be freer.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
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
Authority | Children | Freedom | Individual | Little | Rights | Work |
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.
Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat
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
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...Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall all be alike - brothers of one father and one mother, with only the sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all.
Chance | Earth | Father | Government | Law | Man | Men | Mother | People | Rights | Spirit | Will | Government |
Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat
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.
Chance | Earth | Law | Liberty | Man | Men | Mother | Peace | People | Rights | Spirit | Wants |
Dagobert Runes, fully Dabovert David Runes
Morality is the observance of the rights of others.
Property rights are not the rights of property; they are the rights of humans in regard to property.
The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience.
Consideration | Government | Men | Organization | Rights | Government | Govern |
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.
Democracy | Government | Men | Practice | Respect | Rights | Self | Respect |
There is no divine right of property. Nothing is so completely a man’s own that he may do what he likes with it... Nevertheless, as it is obviously well that each man should labor without fear of being deprived of the use and enjoyment of the product of their labor - as in the nature of things he would not labor at all without some such incentive, it may be said that a man has natural right to own the product of his labor... By this natural right of the individual is still subject to all the limitations imposed by the rights of his fellows.
Enjoyment | Fear | Individual | Labor | Man | Nature | Nothing | Property | Right | Rights |
In the cause of freedom, we have to battle for the rights of people with whom we do not agree; and whom, in many cases, we may not like. These people test the strength of the freedoms which protect all of us. If we do not defend their rights, we endanger our own.