Quotes · Skopia

16 quotes

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Declaration of Independence

1776

★ 10.0

Interview · TV program

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of human rights.

Desmond Tutu

1985

★ 6.9

"A fair day's-wages for a fair day's work:" it is as just a demand as Governed men ever made of Governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

Thomas Carlyle

Past and Present · 1843

★ 5.3

Novel

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Honore de Balzac

La Comedie humaine · 1834

★ 3.7

Political literature

Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor.

Edmund Burke

Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790

★ 3.6

It takes no compromising to give people their rights... It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.

Harvey Milk

1973

★ 3.5

Philosophical literature

Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings...No infant-disabled or not-has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time.

Peter Singer

Practical Ethics · 1979

★ 3.5

Most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations about the proper application of the word "human."

Suzanne LaFollette

The Beginnings of Emancipation · 1926

★ 2.7

Political literature

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

Thomas Jefferson

A Summary View of the Rights of British America · 1774

★ 2.2

Speech · Political speech

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

Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy · 1961

★ 2.0

Speech

The slave trade is contrary to the laws of God and to the rights of men.

David Hartley (the Younger)

1776

★ 1.9

Political literature

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts.

Jeremy Bentham

1832

★ 1.9

Speech

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

William Lloyd Garrison

1853

★ 1.9

Speech · Political speech

We believe that all men have a right to equal justice under law and equal opportunity to share in the common good. We believe that all men have a right to freedom of thought and expression. We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God.

Harry Truman

Second Inaugural Address of Harry Truman · 1949

★ 1.9

Essay · Political literature

Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever.

Joseph Priestley

1768

★ 1.8

Political literature

Surely of all 'rights of man,' this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.

Thomas Carlyle

1840

★ 1.0

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