Top 1200 Fundamental Rights Quotes & Sayings

I think the government has a role in protecting the fundamental rights of its citizens.

We must vigilantly stand on guard within our own borders for human rights and fundamental freedoms which are our proud heritage......w e cannot take for granted the continuance and maintenance of those rights and freedoms.

Health care is not a privilege. It's a right. It's a right as fundamental as civil rights. It's a right as fundamental as giving every child a chance to get a public education.

I would simply not compromise on the fundamental rights of people.

Sometimes I feel I have more faith in European ideals than some of my British or French friends. For them, it's a financial burden. For me, Europe is primarily about values, about fundamental rights, freedom, women's rights.

Some of the occurrences leading up to and immediately following the Berlin World Championships have infringed not only my rights as an athlete but also my fundamental and human rights, including my rights to dignity and privacy.

Gays have rights, lesbians have rights, men have rights, women have rights, even animals have rights. How many of us have to die before the community recognizes that we are not expendable?

It just seems so fundamental to me. I'm able to marry the person I wanted to marry. That's the fundamental human imperative. Those of us who have been lucky enough should expand these rights to others.

If you wish to have free access to the single market, then you have to accept the fundamental rights as well as obligation that come from it.

Japan and Australia share the universal values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and fundamental human rights.

I believe in animal rights, human rights, land rights, water rights, air rights.

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.

The idea of human rights as a fundamental principle can be seen to underlie throughout Islamic teachings.

The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly held that marriage is one of the most fundamental rights that we have as Americans under our Constitution.

No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.

The fundamental basis of this Nation's law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul.

Most libertarians agree that all rights are, in effect, property rights, beginning with this fundamental right to self-ownership and control of one's own life. As owners of their own lives, individuals are completely free to do absolutely anything they wish with them provided, of course, that it doesn't violate the identical right of others whether the people around them approve of what they do or not.

Fundamental is the need for governments to protect the space for citizens to claim their rights, organize, and express themselves.

I typically don't use the distinction 'positive' and 'negative' liberty, because negative sounds bad and positive sounds good, and I don't think that the terminology ought to prejudice us one way or the other. So I think the more descriptive term is 'liberty rights' versus 'welfare rights'. So, liberty rights are freedom-of-action type rights, and welfare rights are rights-to-stuff, of various kinds...And, property rights are not rights-to-stuff. I think that's one of the key misunderstandings about property. Property rights are the rights to liberty within your jurisdiction.

Each state, so that it does not abridge the great fundamental rights belonging, under the Constitution, to all citizens, may grant or withhold such civil rights as it pleases; all that is required is that, in this respect, its laws shall be impartial.

In my judgment the people of no nation can lose their liberty so long as a Bill of Rights like ours survives and its basic purposes are conscientiously interpreted, enforced and respected so as to afford continuous protection against old, as well as new, devices and practices which might thwart those purposes. I fear to see the consequences of the Court's practice of substituting its own concepts of decency and fundamental justice for the language of the Bill of Rights as its point of departure in interpreting and enforcing that Bill of Rights.

What are we fighting the terrorists for if we ourselves do not even stand up for democracy - civil liberties and fundamental rights - which includes independence of the judiciary?

The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount…If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.

The most significant civil rights problem is voting. Each citizen's right to vote is fundamental to all the other rights of citizenship and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 make it the responsibility of the Department of Justice to protect that right.

Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum - all we are supposed to expect - but human rights aren't enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

Fundamental rights are for everyone and have to be respected by everyone. But we can't be naïve in dealing with those who are abusing the principles protecting fundamental rights.

I'm never going to beg for pardon for exercising fundamental rights.

Those who have been outspoken in advocating human rights during these last forty years, have themselves grabbed the most fundamental of human rights from the people of the Third-World countries.

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.

The world is littered with constitutions that have written guarantees of rights but that don't actually deliver rights. What differentiates the ones where rights are real from where rights are fake is that it's in the initial interests of the majority to actually deliver these rights.

The Court has long held that the Constitution protects certain fundamental rights that are not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution's text, while at the same time emphasizing that courts must proceed with great caution in recognizing such rights.

We physicians have focused on the nuclear threat as the singular issue of our era. We are not indifferent to other human rights and hard-won civil liberties. But first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all rights, which preconditions all others; the right to survival.

We passed the Voting Rights Act of Virginia, which restores and builds on key provisions of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act that was gutted by the United States Supreme Court. Voting is fundamental to our democracy, and this legislation is a model for how states can ensure the integrity of elections and protect the sacred right to vote.

That no free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles; and by the recognition by all citizens that they have duties as well as rights, and that such rights cannot be enjoyed save in a society where law is respected and due process is observed.

The Human Rights Act is not a terrorists' charter. It enables ordinary citizens to seek redress when the government breaches fundamental freedoms enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights such as the right to a fair trial, the right to life and free expression.

Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth.

We need to have Turkey respect democracy, human rights, and fundamental freedoms.

Relativism should be confronted where it damages fundamental human rights, because we're not relativists if we believe that the human being should be at the centre of society and the rights of every human being should be respected.

The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others. Neither can we permit states' rights at the expense of human rights.

I am willing to take any measures when it comes to the fundamental principle of human rights.

To me, feminism is such a simple description: it's equal rights, economic rights, political rights, and social rights.

I recognize no rights but human rights - I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights.

Well-established Supreme Court precedents indicate that states - like the states of Washington and Minnesota - have no equal-protection rights of their own, nor can they vindicate equal-protection rights of their citizens. The same is true about being able to challenge alleged religious discrimination. This limitation on the states' authority to champion such claims is fundamental to our separation-of-powers architecture.

We're talking about in the Proposition 8 case fundamental rights, civil rights. I offer no apology for the position I took in Prop. 8.

My belief in human rights includes a fundamental principle that is written into Article 1 of the UN Charter: respect for equal rights and self-determination.

Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right-the right to life-and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

Fundamental rights are not a given today. We have to protect them.

What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.

Unfortunately, I have witnessed millions of children suffering from the deprivation of basic rights such as the rights to education, the rights to health and the rights to play.

The inviolability of the person which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life. Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights-for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture- is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination.

It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation's foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action.

At the end of the day, these are issues that need to be discussed: femicides, among other things - immigrant rights, women's' rights, indigenous people's rights, animal rights, Mother Earth's rights. If we don't talk about these topics, then we have no place in democracy. It won't exist. Democracy isn't just voting; it's relegating your rights.

There's this big debate that goes on in America about what rights are: Civil rights, human rights, what they are? it's an artificial debate. Because everybody has rights. Everybody has rights - I don't care who you are, what you do, where you come from, how you were born, what your race or creed or color is. You have rights. Everybody's got rights.

What's blinking red on my radar is the fact that for people who prioritize abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, or voting rights, those things are coming out of state legislatures, and some of the laws on reproduction stuff is coming out of city council, and so what's getting at me is the fact that there's just a fundamental lack of understanding that these laws are happening and being created by people who often won by ten votes in a midterm election.

The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investment.

To me, the European Union says there is a charter that protects you; you have fundamental rights, and they are staying silent when they are violating my fundamental rights.

In your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor's verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.

Fidel Castro's legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.

Human rights in China should absolutely play a role in broader U.S. policy toward China. When we look the other way on fundamental issues of human rights, we are also responsible.

The Muslim world suffers from internal divisions, antidemocratic practices, and the violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms.