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"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 · 1843Surely 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
The slave trade is contrary to the laws of God and to the rights of men. — David Hartley (the Younger) · 1776
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
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 · 1790
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 · 1949
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
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact. — Honore de Balzac · 1834
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts. — Jeremy Bentham · 1832
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 · 1961
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
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 · 1979
Most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations about the proper application of the word "human." — Suzanne LaFollette · 1926
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time. — Thomas Jefferson · 1774
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