Rights

“ This great law and this great legitimacy are the enjoyment of the natural rights of man, ruled by his duties; for it is the duty that creates the right, and not the right that creates the duty; the passions and the vices relegate us to the class of slaves. ”

“ Here again we have the great threefold division of the rights of freemen, asserted as the rights of man. Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are equivalent to the rights of life, liberty, and property. These are the fundamental rights which can only be taken away by due process of law, and which can only be interfered with, or the enjoyment of which can only be modified, by lawful regulations necessary or proper for the mutual good of all; and these rights, I contend, belong to the citizens of every free government. ”

“ One of the grandest things in having rights is that, being your rights, you may give them up—except, of course, they involve duties with the performance of which the abnegation would interfere.” ”

“ It may be taken to imply that rights and obligations can exist in a 'state of nature'—a state in which every individual is free to do as he likes—; that legal rights and obligations derive their authority from a voluntary act by which individuals contracted themselves out of this state; and that the individual retains from the state of nature certain rights with which no legal obligations ought to conflict. ”

“ DEDUCTION OF AN EQUILIBRIUM OF RIGHTS.—All law relations are determined by this principle: each one must restrict his freedom by the possibility of the freedom of the other. ”

“ "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; ”

“ The rights of man were proclaimed, and it appeared as if with the freedom and the rule of the third Estate, all legal privileges had disappeared from the community, and all differences founded upon them had been swallowed up and absorbed in the one idea of the freedom of man. ”

“ The respect for rights supposes, or produces, the respect for law, the habitual source of rights. The real and the possible, rights and law, such are the subjects upon which the political spirit is constantly exercised, and which become the habitual objects of its inquiry and its veneration. It thus maintains, or re-establishes, a moral principle of fixity in the relations of individuals, and a moral principle of authority in those of the state. ”

“ All rights, when the essence of them is spoken of, are powers; powers to an individual, which the governing members of the community guarantee; powers, more or less extensive, of making either a person or a thing subservient to the gratification of his desires. To be made to gratify the desire of an individual, is to be made to render him a service. ”

“ The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government. ”

“ Constitutions are intended to preserve practical and substantial rights, not to maintain theories. ”

“ We have inquired what it is in the nature of man that renders him capable of these rights, what are the moral ends to which the rights are relative, and in what form the rights should be realised in order to the attainment of these ends. In order to make the inquiry into rights complete, we ought to go on to examine in the same way the rights which arise out of the establishment of a state, the rights connected with the several functions of government ”

“ This renowned Declaration of Rights reads as follows:—
“Nature has made all men free and equal; the distinctions which are necessary for social order are founded alone on the public good.
“Man is born with inalienable and imprescriptible rights, such as the unshackled liberty of opinion, the care of his honor and life, the right of property, the complete control over his person, his industry, and all his faculties; the free expression of his opinion in every possible manner; the worship of the Almighty; and resistance against oppression. ”

“ II. The object of all society ought to be the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are his liberty, his property, his security, and the resistance of oppression. ”

“ And again, "Those rights which God and nature have established, and which are therefore called 'natural rights,' such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws, to be more effectually vested in every man, than they are. ”

“ But our modern, free, constitutional states are constructed entirely on the notion of rights, and we regard them as performing their functions more and more perfectly according as they guarantee rights in consonance with the constantly corrected and expanded notions of rights from one generation to another. ”

“ Social rights and obligations are reciprocal.
The right to be protected in the possession of life, liberty, and property, imposes the duty of not infringing on those of others, and even of protecting them. ”

“ The rights themselves are regarded as the natural and inalienable rights belonging to every individual, or as political, and based upon or arising from principles inherent in the very nature of a system of free government. ”

“ The capacity, then, on the part of the individual of conceiving a good as the same for himself and others, and of being determined to action by that conception, is the foundation of rights; and rights are the condition of that capacity being realised. ”

“ It is one which affects, not only the history and learning of the country, and that powerfully, but the legal rights and titles of all classes—of every man, woman, and child, rich and poor, great and small, born into this English portion of this breathing world. ”

“ The degree to which the individual judges for himself of the relation between the common good and the laws which cross the path of his ordinary life, is the measure of his intelligent, as distinguished from a merely instinctive, recognition of rights in others and in the state ”

“ Conceptions of social rights and obligations and the institutions based upon them continue unquestioned for long periods as postulates in all discussions upon questions of government. Whatever conduct conforms to them is assumed to be right. Whatever is at variance with them is assumed to be wrong. ”

“ In the exercise of these natural rights, it has been supposed, men with a view to their general interest established political society. From that establishment is derived both the system of rights and obligations maintained by law as between man and man, and the right of the state to the submission of its subjects. ”

“ In saying that only among 'persons' can there come to be rights, and that every 'person' should have rights, I have been careful to explain that I use 'person' in the moral, not merely in the legal, sense. ”

“ For the convenience of analysis, we may treat the obligations correlative to rights, obligations which it is the proper office of law to enforce, apart from moral duties and from the virtues which are tendencies to fulfil those duties. ”

“ You must ever bear in mind that while, when you become citizens, you will possess certain rights and privileges—such as the elective franchise and equality before the law—there are, as well, sacred obligations and duties imposed upon you, as citizens, that should be faithfully regarded and performed. ”

“ On the other hand, the constitutions of all civilized governments, whether written or unwritten, the principles of the civil as well as those of the common law, and the teachings of wise men of ancient and of modern times, recognize as a duty the protection of individual or selfish interests. They recognize as just and necessary the restraint and punishment of wrong-doers, and the protection of the rights and interests of the individual in person and property. ”

“ That which determines the relations of individual members of society to each other; which defines the rights growing out of that relation; and regulates the right of property, and such personal rights as must subsist even in a state of nature. ”

“ These rights are indivisible. These are the rights, which make the essence of sovereignty; and which are the marks, whereby a man may discern in what man, or assembly of men, the sovereign power is placed, and resideth. ”

“ In the opposite class of moral beings, we have placed an equality of civil rights, freedom of religion, and of inquiry, division of power, national influence or sovereignty, knowledge, uncorrupted representation, and actual responsibility. This enumeration of a few individuals used to explain our reasoning, and not as including entire classes. ”

“ Nevertheless, I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world. ”

“ Rights, properly so-called, are corollaries from the law of equal freedom, and "so far is it from its being true, as some claim, that the warrant for what are properly called rights is derived from law, it is, conversely, true that law derives its warrant from them." ”

“ If we raise the level of our review to a more spiritual range, we are confronted with the world where rights are established and enforced, the world of legislative enactment, family life, division of social classes, in a word, the concrete living organism of the State. ”

“ Thus, legal justice directs the parts to respect the rights of the whole, and it is exercised by all those who promote the common good of a society by fulfilling well the duties which pertain to their position and rank in the society. ”

“ I sum them up in these terms:—There are certain universal rights inherent in man's nature, and which no system can legitimately withhold from any one; there are individual rights which spring from personal merit alone, without regard to the external circumstances of birth, fortune, or rank, and which every one who has them in himself should be permitted to exercise. ”

“ The rights vesting in an English subject by the statutes of the country—the rights vesting in man, as the subject of civil government, by the laws of God and nature, are scanned by awakened reason, and put arms into men's hands. ”

“ One or other of them may be coming to do so, or ceasing to do so, but rights, though on the one hand they are eternal or at least coeval with human society, on the other hand take time to form themselves in this or that particular subject and to transfer themselves from one subject to another ”

“ Liberty does not consist, my fellow-citizens, in mere general declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action. ”

“ Now I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; every citizen must be put in possession of his rights, or rights must be granted to no one. ”

“ The great principle of the common law, which is equally the teaching of Christian morality, so to use one's property as not to injure others, forbids any other application or use of the rights and powers conferred. ”

“ The objection to calling them 'innate' or 'natural,' when once it is admitted on the one side that rights are not arbitrary creations of law or custom but that there are certain powers which ought to be secured as rights, on the other hand that there are no rights antecedent to society, none that men brought with them into a society which they contracted to form, is mainly one of words. ”