This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Since man created government to help secure and safeguard [inalienable] rights [from God], it follows that man is superior to government and should remain master over it, not the other way around.
Government | Man | Rights | Government |
The Declaration of Independence . . . is much more than a political document. It constitutes a spiritual manifesto—revelation, if you will—declaring not for this nation only, but for all nations, the source of man's rights. Nephi, a Book of Mormon prophet, foresaw over 2,300 years ago that this event would transpire. The colonies he saw would break with Great Britain and that 'the power of the Lord was with [the colonists],' that they 'were delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations' (1 Nephi 13:16, 19). "The Declaration of Independence was to set forth the moral justification of a rebellion against a long-recognized political tradition—the divine right of kings. At issue was the fundamental question of whether men's rights were God-given or whether these rights were to be dispensed by governments to their subjects. This document proclaimed that all men have certain inalienable rights. In other words, these rights came from God.
God | Justification | Lord | Men | Power | Question | Rebellion | Right | Rights | God |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents — blood, family, tribe — to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.
Dependence | Individual | Mother |
It must never be forgotten, however, that the Bill of Rights was the child of the Enlightenment. Back of the guarantee of free speech lay faith in the power of an appeal to reason by all the peaceful means for gaining access to the mind. It was in order to avert force and explosions due to restrictions upon rational modes of communication that the guarantee of free speech was given a generous scope. But utterance in a context of violence can lose its significance as an appeal to reason and become part of an instrument of force. Such utterance was not meant to be sheltered by the Constitution.
Faith | Force | Free speech | Guarantee | Means | Order | Power | Reason | Rights | Speech | Child |
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
Free speech | Rights | Speech |
Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?
Authority | Global | Hunger | Man | Rights | System | Waste | Wealth | Woman | Child |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.
French National Assembly - Declaration of the Rights of Man NULL
Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
French National Assembly - Declaration of the Rights of Man NULL
The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law
Where the people possess no authority, their rights obtain no respect.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Nobody talks more passionately of his rights than he who, in the depths of his soul, is doubtful about harm.
Rights |
Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds.
A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of his friends, and that the most liberal professions of good will are very far from being the surest marks of it. I should be happy that my own experience had afforded fewer examples of the little dependence to be placed upon them.
Acquaintance | Dependence | Experience | Good | Happy | Little | Will | World |
The theory of dependence will take the wrong path and lead to deception if the analysis is not put within the framework of the worldwide class struggle
Dependence | Will | Wrong |
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.
Rights |
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, — the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.
Qualities we look for in a liberally educated person: He is one who is deeply interested in life and enjoys it; who is sympathetic and generous in his attitude to other people, cultures, and countries, who accepts his world and himself as a growing, changing enterprise; who is sensitive to the beautiful and the ugly in actions and objects; who believes in human rights and freedom; who has a degree of knowledge and knows how to get the knowledge he does not have and who has at least a moderate skill in the art of living.
Art | Knowledge | Life | Life | Rights | Skill | Ugly | World | Art |