These individual rights quotes will inspire you. Individual rights are the rights needed by each individual to pursue their lives and goals without interference from other individuals or the government.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging individual rights quotes, individual rights sayings, and individual rights proverbs.
Best Individual Rights 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.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Individualism regards man – every man – as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights – and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” ~ Ayn Rand
-
“The erosion of a nation’s concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny.” ~ Gerry Spence
- “The greater the importance to safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion.” ~ Charles Evans Hughes
- “The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with.” ~ Eleanor Holmes Norton
- “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
-
“You can’t have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” ~ Larry Flynt
- “Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.” ~ Ron Paul
- “My own sense as an American is that we have begun to experience the disadvantages of framing virtually all moral issues in terms of individual rights. American history has consisted of swings back and forth between rights talk on the one hand and talk of duties, responsibilities, and the common good on the other hand. Recent decades have seen a big swing toward rights, and conceived in very individualistic terms, which hasn’t always been the case even with rights.” ~ David Wong
-
“Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.” ~ Samuel Adams
- “Majority rule only works if you’re also considering individual rights. Because you can’t have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.” ~ Larry Flynt
- “Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government” ~ Henry A. Kissinger
-
“I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.” ~ Clarence Thomas
- “The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals… It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.” ~ Albert Gallatin
- “A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
-
“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” ~ James Madison
- “Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.” ~ Jimmy Carter
- “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world … Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
- “When the government violates the people’s rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.” ~ Marquis de Lafayette
-
“Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight.” ~ Bob Marley
- “In Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.” ~ Nong ?uc Manh
- “Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
-
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” ~ Patrick Henry
- “But what I believe is that if a person’s individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don’t issue mandates to businesses that you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that.” ~ Clarence Thomas
- “Any successful nominee should possess both the temperament to interpret the law and the wisdom to do so fairly. The next Supreme Court Justice should have a record of protecting individual rights and a strong willingness to put aside any political agenda.” ~ Bennie Thompson
- “America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.” ~ Jimmy Carter
-
“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 rights.” ~ Desmond Tutu
- “Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
-
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person…Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
- “The right to development is the measure of the respect of all other human rights.That should be our aim: a situation in which all individuals are enabled to maximize their potential, and to contribute to the evolution of society as a whole.” ~ Kofi Annan
- “All mankind… being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” ~ John Locke , Individual rights quotes life
-
“Law is often the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.” ~ John Locke
- “The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.” ~ James Madison
- “It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
-
“One of the greatest perils to an extensive republic is the disregard of individual rights.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “If you’re too stupid to understand that a philosophy that favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic, and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should use this rule of thumb: If someone isn’t advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn’t assume he’s a Nazi and you should know it’s pretty damn evil to call him one.” ~ Jonah Goldberg
- “The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people’s stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.” ~ Steven Pinker
- “Theres something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gilded age, and the culture of individualism became a culture of avarice.” ~ George Hickenlooper
-
“The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.” ~ Anna Pavlova
- “If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America – even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles.” ~ Alberto J. Mora
- “The government’s only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud … to protect men from foreign invaders … to settle disputes among men according to objective laws … The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights; it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is man’s deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written.” ~ Ayn Rand
-
“We talk about democracy as if it’s a safeguard for individual rights… Instead, it’s become our way of intruding on rights, allegedly in the name of that most collectivist of concepts: The Common Good.” ~ Jonathan D. Morris
- “The one thing man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by a World Government, a New World Order.” ~ Henry A. Kissinger
- “First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.” ~ Michael Sandel
- “It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age.” ~ James Mackintosh
-
“Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments… The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments-that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity.” ~ John Hospers
- “The Declaration of Independence has been called, with some justice, the most revolutionary document in human history, in that it placed the individual person first in the political scheme of things and made the legitimacy of governments and ruling classes contingent on their success at preserving individual rights.” ~ Alan Bock
- “America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more-and nothing less. The rest-everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything ‘noble and just,’ and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history-was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.” ~ Ayn Rand
-
“Freedom of conscience is a natural right, both antecedent and superior to all human laws and institutions whatever; a right which laws never gave and a right which laws can never take away.” ~ John Goodwin
- “The Bible and its teachings helped form the basis for the Founding Fathers’ abiding belief in the inalienable rights of the individual, rights which they found implicit in the Bible’s teachings of the inherent worth and dignity of each individual. This same sense of man patterned the convictions of those who framed the English system of law inherited by our own Nation, as well as the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “One of the interesting things about the ancient Greeks is that they really didn’t have our conception of individual rights. They didn’t have our conception of all lives matters. And it was really was true for them, that certain lives matter a lot more than others. It didn’t dawn on them that all lives, although different, can be lives of equal mattering. And that is actually something a huge ethical lesson.” ~ Rebecca Goldstein
-
“We need to insist on fathers and mothers sharing the care of their offspring as well as the opportunity to enjoy the fulfillment of individual rights.” ~ Mary Frances Berry
- “Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Striking a balance in favor of individual rights has always been the right decision for us and that it remains so even when technology gives us new ways to exercise those rights. Individual liberty has never weakened us; freedom of speech, enhanced by the Net, will only make us stronger.” ~ Mike Godwin
