 Freedom
Keys
a
collection of
amusing,
fascinating,
insightful,
or
maybe
even useful
information
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About Rights
RIGHTS are
expressions of LIBERTY, not
of privilege,
of FREEDOM,
NOT of slavery.
|
"A 'right'
is a moral principle defining and
sanctioning a man's freedom of action in
a social context. There is only one
fundamental right (all others are its
consequences or corollaries): a man's
right to his own life.
"The concept
of individual rights is so new in human
history that most men have not grasped it
fully to this day.
"It was the
concept of individual rights that had
given birth to a free society. It was with
the destruction of individual rights that
the destruction of freedom had to
begin.
"If some men
are entitled by right to the products of
the work of others, it means that those
others are deprived of rights and
condemned to slave labor. Any
alleged 'right' of one man, which
necessitates the violation of the rights
of another, is not and cannot be a
right. No man can have a right to
impose an unchosen obligation, an
unrewarded duty or an involuntary
servitude on another man. There can
be no such thing as the 'right to
enslave.' "
"The term
'individual rights' is a redundancy: there
is no other kind of rights and no one else
to possess them."
-- Ayn Rand
in "Man's Rights"
"Man's
rights may not be left at
the unilateral decision, the
arbitrary
choice, the
irrationality, the whim of
another man."
-- Ayn Rand
in "The Nature of
Government"
|
"Any group or
'collective,' large or small, is only a
number of individuals. A group can have no
rights other than the rights of its
individual members. In a free society, the
'rights' of any group are derived from the
rights of its members through their
voluntary, individual choice and contractual
agreement, and are merely the application
of these individual rights to a specific
undertaking... A group, as such, has no
rights.
"Any doctrine
of group activities that does not
recognize individual rights is a doctrine
of mob rule or legalized lynching... A nation that violates
the rights of its own citizens cannot
claim any rights whatsoever.
In
the issue of rights, as in all moral
issues, there can be no double
standard."
"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 in "Collectivized 'Rights' "
"Man's Rights" begins on
page 108, and "Collectivized 'Rights'
" on page 118 of THIS BOOK.
"The end
does not justify the means.
No one's
rights can be secured by the violation
of the rights of others."
--
Ayn Rand, "The Cashing-In: The Student
Rebellion," Capitalism: The Unknown
Ideal
"Rights are conditions
of existence required by man's nature
for his proper survival. If man is to
live on earth, it is right for him to
use his mind, it is right to act on his
own free judgment, it is right to work
for his values and to keep the product
of his work. If life on earth is
his purpose, he has a right to live as a
rational being: nature forbids him the
irrational."
-- Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged
"Whether one believes that man is the
product of a creator or of nature, the
issue of man's origin does not alter the
fact that he is an entity of a specific
kind---a rational being---that he cannot
function successfully under coercion,
and that rights are a necessary
condition of his particular mode of
survival." - Ayn Rand
"If men are to live
together in a peaceful, productive,
rational society and deal with one another
to mutual benefit, they must accept the
basic social principle without which no
moral or civilized society is possible:
the principle of individual rights." - Ayn
Rand
"English
philosopher John Locke (1632-1704)
defined natural rights this way:
Life: everyone is entitled to live.
Liberty: everyone is entitled to do
anything they want to so long as it
doesn’t conflict with the first right.
Estate: everyone is entitled to own
all they create or gain through gift
or trade so long as it doesn’t
conflict with the first two rights.
America was founded upon these
philosophical concepts. The ideas and
ideals of natural rights and natural
law were embodied in the Declaration
of Independence and our Constitution
by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
Thomas Paine, and other Founders." -
Jeffrey Harding, HERE
|
"If every person has the
right to defend even by force -- his
person, his liberty, and his property,
then it follows that a group of men
have the right to organize and support
a common force to protect these rights
constantly. Thus the principle of
collective right -- its reason for
existing, its lawfulness -- is based
on individual right. And the common
force that protects this collective
right cannot logically have any other
purpose or any other mission than that
for which it acts as a substitute.
Thus, since an individual cannot
lawfully use force against the person,
liberty, or property of another
individual, then the common force --
for the same reason -- cannot lawfully
be used to destroy the person,
liberty, or property of individuals or
groups."
--
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law |
"Justice is a cardinal
virtue that renders to another what
rightfully belongs to him. It is the ideal
of man, the rule of conduct given to
mankind. By necessity of nature man has
certain rights, or claims in justice,
which are moral and lawful to possess or
obtain. These rights are antecedent to and
independent of the state, rights which the
state must not violate. In fact, the
state, or civil society, is instituted to
preserve these rights to its subjects, to
adjudge rights as between individuals—to
render justice. The idea of right and
justice is the general basis of the legal
and governmental institutions of what is
known as Western Civilization."
-- Hans F. Sennholz
"Property is surely a right
of mankind as real as liberty. The
moment the idea is admitted into society
that property is not as sacred as the laws
of God, and that there is not a force of
law and public justice to protect it,
anarchy and tyranny commence."
-- John Adams
"If we buy into the notion
that somehow property rights are less
important, or are in conflict with, human
or civil rights, we give the socialists a
freer hand to attack our property."
-- Walter E. Williams
"Work to restore the
original concept of 'rights.' A right,
such as a right to free speech, imposes no
obligation on another, except that of
non-interference. The so-called right to
health care, food or housing, whether a
person can afford it or not, is something
entirely different; it does impose an
obligation on another. If one person has a
right to something he didn’t produce,
simultaneously and of necessity it means
that some other person does not have right
to something he did produce. That’s
because, since there’s no Santa Claus or
Tooth Fairy, in order for government to
give one American a dollar, it must,
through intimidation, threats and
coercion, confiscate that dollar from some
other American." - Walter E. Williams
"A right is
a claim to freedom of action (including
that of securing privacy) which is the
basis for the 'basic golden
rule,' which is: 'Do nothing unto others
you wouldn't want them to do unto you,'
or, as Alfred the Great put it, "What
ye will that other men should not do
to you, that do ye not to other men."
(King Alfred's Book of Laws,
circa 878 AD, according to Winston Churchill's History
of the English Speaking Peoples)
"As Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, 'The right to
swing my fist ends where the other man's
nose begins.' Rights must apply to
everyone in the same sense at the same
time. So rights must therefore be limited
to claims of freedom to do anything which
does not violate the freedoms of
others. This requires recognizing,
respecting and abiding by anyone else's
wishes to be left alone whenever he wants,
and his wishes to be free to do
anything which doesn't violate others.
This is why no one can claim a 'right' to
interfere with your life in any
way without your explicit, personally-given
consent for a specified purpose. There can
be no such thing as a 'right' for anyone
(or any group) to mess with you whenever he
wants (or whenever they want) since it
obviously isn't applying to YOU in the
same sense at the same time.
"The purpose
of a Bill of Rights is to prevent anyone
(including the majority-of-the-moment)
from violating (or even voting away the
recognition of) the rights of anyone else
(including a minority of one).
"We who use
the English language are blessed with the
words 'allowing' and 'permission'
to refer to a freedom of action granted by
another person or persons. This helps
emphasize the clear distinction of a right
as being a freedom of action a person
claims for himself.
"We who use
the English language are cursed with the
word 'public' being used for both
government property and its use, as in
'public building', and for private
property and its use, as in 'open to
the public.' This can let
intellectually sloppy and even
intentionally dictatorial people try to
get away with implying that private
property must be treated as government
property, no matter the owners' wishes.
"Rights apply
to living beings who rely on their
conscious choice- making abilities to
live, as they are an integral part of
their codes of ethics -- meaning guides to
decision-making -- in cases where other
decision-makers are involved. On Earth,
anyway, this obviously applies only to
human beings and their interactions with
each other.
"Rights
include the right for anyone to defend
himself from any force or fraud initiated
by others.
"Rights are
negative in nature. My right to free
speech does not override your rights. I
cannot force you to print my article in
your newspaper. The government is
here to prevent anyone from interfering
with my right of free speech.
Similarly, I have a right to apply for a
job with your company. I do not have
a right to a job! I cannot, and the
government cannot, force you to hire
me. Same for medical care, food,
clothing, etc. I have a right to
look for these things, but I cannot force
you to provide them. We can't safeguard
Peter's rights by stepping on Paul's."
-- Marty Lewinter
"If positive rights are valid,
then negative rights cannot be, for the
two are mutually contradictory. ... The
existence of negative rights means that
no one ought to enslave another, coerce
another, or deprive another of his
property; and that each of us may
properly resist such conduct when others
engage in it." - Tibor Machan
"Individual rights is the
only proper principle of human coexistence,
because it rests on man's nature, i.e., the
nature and requirements of a conceptual
consciousness." - AynRand
|
"Rights do not come from
governments nor their
Constitutions. They come
from man's nature (and/or, if you
prefer, his Creator).
Thus governments should be
instituted among men to protect
rights, not to grant them or to
violate them.
"Without consistent recognition
and protection of individual
rights, no civilization can last
long. People's ability and
willingness to simply live in
close proximity to one another,
let alone their ability and
willingness to cooperate with
one another, would be lost (Of
course, the importance of rights
is irrelevant to anyone who
lives as a hermit in permanent
isolation.). Anyone who uses
even the tiniest product or
benefit of civilization to
advocate even the "tiniest"
violation of human rights is
guilty of perpetrating the
fallacy of the stolen concept
(in this case trying to use
rights to deny rights), the
inconsistency which destroys
civilization, and all its
benefits, in the long run (in
effect using civilization to
destroy civilization)."
-- Rick Gaber
|
"From the fact
that people are very different it follows
that, if we treat them equally, the result
must be inequality in their actual position,
and that the only way to place them in an
equal position would be to treat them
differently. Equality before the law
and material equality are therefore not only
different but are in conflict with each
other; and we can achieve either one or the
other, but not both at the same time." -- F.
A. Hayek
"Equality, in a social sense,
may be divided into that of condition, and
that of rights. Equality of condition is
incompatible with civilization, and is found
only to exist in those communities that are
but slightly removed from the savage state.
In practice, it can only mean a common
misery." -- James Fenimore Cooper
"Machan
shines as he exposes embarrassing
contradictions of egalitarianism. Example:
'If welfare and equality are to be
primary aims of law, some people must
necessarily possess a greater power of
coercion in order to force
redistribution of material goods.
Political power alone should be equal
among human beings; yet, striving for
other kinds of equality absolutely
requires political inequality.' "
-- from Jim Powell's Review
of Private Rights and
Public Illusions
by Tibor Machan
"Rights are the
implementation of freedom, yet rights decide
only one issue. They decide who gets to decide. ...
[The initiation of ] force is immoral.
The use of force to achieve an objective,
any objective, deprives the result of any
morality at all. It degrades and
demeans both the objective and the result.”
-- Tom and Linda Rawles
"...the
question becomes, are you going to have
everyone play by the same rules, or are
you going to try to rectify the
shortcomings, errors and failures of the
entire cosmos? Because those things are
wholly incompatible. If you're going to
have people play by the same rules, that
can be enforced with a minimum amount of
interference with people's freedom. But if
you're going to try to make the entire
cosmos right and just, somebody has got to
have an awful lot of power to impose what
they think is right on an awful lot of
other people. What we've seen,
particularly in the 20th century, is that
putting that much power in anyone's hands
is enormously dangerous."
--
Thomas Sowell, in an interview in Salon11-10-99
"A free people
[claim] their rights as derived from the
laws of nature, and not as the gift of
their chief magistrate." -- Thomas
Jefferson: Rights of British America,
1774
"Under the law of nature, all men are born
free, every one comes into the world with
a right to his own person, which includes
the liberty of moving and using it at his
own will. This is what is called personal
liberty, and is given him by the Author of
nature, because necessary for his own
sustenance." -- Thomas Jefferson: Legal
Argument, 1770
"What is true of every member of the
society, individually, is true of them all
collectively; since the rights of the
whole can be no more than the sum of the
rights of the individuals." -- Thomas
Jefferson to James Madison, 1789
"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a
million of human beings, collected
together, are not under the same moral
laws which bind each of them separately."
-- Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 1816
"The majority, oppressing an individual,
is guilty of a crime." --Thomas Jefferson
to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816
"Individual
rights are the means of subordinating
society to moral law." -- Ayn Rand
"The
function of rights is to keep society
from riding roughshod over the
individual. ... Individual rights are
inalienable--which means, they were
not transferred to you by anyone
or any government." -- Wayne Dunn
"The
authority of government ... can have no
pure right over my person and my property
but what I concede to it." -- Henry David
Thoreau
"It is to secure our rights that we resort
to government at all." -- Thomas Jefferson
to Francois D'Ivernois, 1795
"Nothing... is unchangeable but the
inherent and unalienable rights of
man." -- Thomas Jefferson to John
Cartwright, 1824
"[Our] principles
[are] founded on the immovable basis of
equal right and reason." -- Thomas
Jefferson to James Sullivan, 1797
"Of liberty I
would say that, in the whole plenitude of
its extent, it is unobstructed action
according to our will. But 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
right of an individual." -- Thomas
Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819
"Those rights,
then, which God and nature have
established, and are therefore called
natural rights, such as life and liberty,
need not the aid of human laws to be more
effectually invested in every man than
they are; neither do they receive any
additional strength when declared by the
municipal laws to be inviolate. On the
contrary, no human legislature has power
to abridge or destroy them, unless the
owner shall himself commit some act that
amounts to a forfeiture." -- Sir
William Blackstone, Commentaries on
the Laws of England, 1765
"A right
without an attendant responsibility is as
unreal as a sheet of paper which has only
one side." – Felix Morley
"If your most
basic right is the right to life, then it
seems obvious to me that you have the
right to defend your life. Guns are, in
this century, the most effective means of
doing so - so effective that every
genocide has only been carried out
against victims who were disarmed by their
governments." --
William G. Hartwell
"As a man is
said to have a right to his property, he
may be equally said to have a property in
his rights. Where an excess of power
prevails, property of no sort is duly
respected. No man is safe in his
opinions, his person, his faculties, or
his possessions."
-- James Madison, National Gazzette,
1792
"A Bill of
Rights that means what the majority
wants it to mean is worthless."
-Justice Atonin Scalia
| To Secure Our
Rights
The
Founders established a
government to secure
individual rights because they
believed, with Locke, that
justice requires communities
to recognize our moral agency.
We have a personal
responsibility to run our own
lives. Governments are
established among men to
procure, preserve, and protect
a realm in which that moral
agency may be freely
exercised.
Enter
the bad guys, stage left.
Those
who sought to retain some
elements of the political
outlook that Locke’s theory
had overthrown—namely, the
view that people are subjects
of the state (in fact, belong
to the state)—found a way to
expropriate and exploit the
concept of human rights to
advance their reactionary
position, just as they
expropriated and exploited the
concept of liberalism. (Yes,
Virginia, Karl Marx was a
reactionary!)
Riding
on purloined prestige, they
perverted the concept of
individual rights at its root
so that it came to mean not
liberty from others but
service from others. Who needs
the right to pursue happiness
when one has the right to be
made happy (even if the
thus-extracted “happiness”
should render the indentured
providers of it miserable)?
This
was a view of rights that
wiped moral agency right out
of existence. Positive rights
are thus nothing more than
mislabeled preferences, or
values, that people want the
government to satisfy or
attain for them—by force
|
|
|
"All rights, including the
right to free speech, are parts of a unified
whole—they are derivations from the
fundamental right to life, and obliteration
of one of them is an eventual obliteration
of them all." -- Carter
Laren
"There is no such thing as
Gay Rights, Women's Rights, or Minority
Rights. The only rights that exist are Human
Rights, those that apply to ALL people. Any
'rights' that apply only to certain groups
are privileges that they are attempting to
obtain by mislabeling them as rights." --
John Dobbins
| "Observe
that all legitimate rights have
one thing in common: they are
rights to action, not to rewards
from other people. The American rights
impose no obligations on other
people, merely the negative
obligation to leave you alone. The
system guarantees you the chance
to work for what you want — not to
be given it without effort by
somebody else. The right to
life, e.g., does not mean that
your neighbors have to feed and
clothe you; it means you have the
right to earn your food and
clothes yourself, if necessary by
a hard struggle, and that no one
can forcibly stop your struggle
for these things or steal them
from you if and when you have
achieved them. In other words: you
have the right to act, and to keep
the results of your actions, the
products you make, to keep them or
to trade them with others, if you
wish. But you have no right to the
actions or products of others,
except on terms to which they
voluntarily agree." |
|
|
"The right to
be let alone is indeed the beginning of
all freedom." -- Supreme Court Justice
William O. Douglas"
"They
conferred, as against the Government, the
right to be let alone--the most prehensive
of rights and the right most valued by
civilized men." -- Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis (Olmstead v. U.S.)
"The right to
be let alone is the underlying principle
of the Constitution's Bill of Rights." --
Erwin N. Griswold
"The authority of
government ... can have no pure right
over my person and my property but what
I concede to it." -- Henry David Thoreau
"A man's
rights are not violated by a private
individual's refusal to deal with him." --
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of
Selfishness
"One must be
free from persecution for one’s political
views, from being arbitrarily imprisoned,
or from having one’s property seized. Such
rights are crucial to human life. Men
cannot learn, make new discoveries, forge
long-range plans, or enjoy the rewards of
their effort, if they live under the
constant threat of being looted,
imprisoned, or murdered. ... In a truly
Orwellian climax, the [U.N.'s] Declaration
brazenly upholds, as an example of man’s
rights and freedoms, the individual’s duty
to serve the state." -- Robert W.
Tracinski in The U.N.'s Distortion of
Rights
"Every group
is predicated on the existence of the
individual. When the individual is
sacrificed, in whole or in part, the group
suffers. Protect the inalienable rights of
the smallest minority -- the lone
individual -- and all minorities as well
as the majority will be protected." --
Zon
"Rights are
based on moral agency and the assumption
of reciprocity. Those who choose not
to respect rights don’t get theirs
respected in return ... it's classic tit
for tat. It’s like advocating
tolerance for everyone but the intolerant,
or violence only toward the violent.
Unconditional tolerance or nonviolence is
not sustainable, and unconditional respect
for rights (for those who disrespect them)
is unilateral ethical disarmament. "
-- Matt McIntosh
"Multiculturalism
is social poison. Toleration of
intolerance isn't sophistication. It's
suicide."-- Jack Kelly
| "Some folk
have access to better dentists or
whatever because they are richer.
That may annoy someone who cannot
afford the whitest teeth, but that
is not proof of unfairness, as
such. To prove it, one would have
to construct an ethical theory
that says that humans have an
apriori claim on their fellows to
receive a certain amount of
healthcare/watever as a "right".
But such "rights" are abuses of
the term: one cannot have a right
to X that requires that another be
forced to provide X, such as
forcing folk to train as doctors
to serve the sick, and so on [or
even forcing ANYone else to pay
for it -- ed.]." -- Jonathan Pearce
"If
some men are entitled by right
to the products of the work of
others, it means that those
others are deprived of rights
and condemned to slave labor."
-- Ayn Rand
"Any alleged
'right' of one man, which
necessitates the violation of
the rights of another, is not
and cannot be a right."-
Ayn Rand
|
Where
do Rights Come From?
...
|
"Human rights are an aspect of
natural law, a consequence of the
way the universe works, as solid and
as real as photons or the concept of
pi. The idea of self-
ownership is the equivalent of
Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by
natural selection, of general
relativity, and of quantum
theory. Before humankind
discovered any of these, it
suffered, to varying degrees, in
misery and ignorance." -- L. Neil
Smith |
|
| Ayn
Rand's Theory of Rights: The Moral
Foundation of a Free Society |
|
| "When
men rise above the strictly
perceptual level of consciousness,
the first, or simplest, of the
conceptual levels enables the
concept of the Golden Rule.
Using his uniquely human capacity
for concept-formation, he can see
that people can best prosper long
term instead of just for a day by
engaging in specialization, trade
and cooperation, and by fostering
an atmosphere of good will among
all by making sure everyone treats
everyone else the same. Thus
the concept of rights appears --
all based on claims of
self-ownership -- essentially as
demands to be left alone until
willing to be socialized with
and/or traded with. So
the concept of the Golden Rule
should be obvious, as a necessity
-- to men who live as humans, that
is, who use their brains, and the
concepts of property and other
rights (which must, of necessity,
apply to everyone in the same
sense at the same time) derive
naturally from that.
Further, they recognize that their
actions can help build, maintain
or destroy civilization, and they
thereby develop a conscience, a
sense of personal responsibility.
"At
the same time, the concept of
the criminal must appear, in
order to designate those who
initiate force or fraud against
others, that is, violating
others' rights, whether they can
grasp the concept of rights or
not. Willfully or not,
criminals remain at the level of
the strictly perceptual
mentality, as do animals, not
thinking long term, only of what
they can 'get away with'
immediately. As predators,
they are dependent upon the
unwilling support of productive
others, so they can't take pride
in their own productivity,
self-sufficiency or personal
integrity. They certainly
don't think anywhere near
conceptually enough to recognize
that their own actions help
build, maintain or destroy
civilization. So for
controlling those who operate on
such a perceptual level and who
therefore could become criminals
at the first opportunity,
preventive 'commandments' as
well as a system of punishments
for wrongdoing may be necessary,
especially if no one has the
time or the resources or even
the ability to train everyone to
think conceptually and recognize
rights.
"What of ancient Greece and the
slave-holding American
colonies? I consider them
to be 'bridge' societies of one
level of development or another,
growing out of primitivism, not
yet fully civilized (Are we
there yet? No, kids, not
by a long shot), but providing
an environment for the further
development of civilization
. Were the abolitionists
right in considering the
Confederacy's slave owners to be
criminals, for example?
Yes, I think so." -- Rick Gaber
|
"A Bill of Rights is what
the people are entitled to against
every government on Earth... and what
no just government should refuse." –
Thomas Jefferson in a Letter to James
Madison, Paris, Dec. 20, 1787
''It has been objected also
against a bill of rights, that, by
enumerating particular exceptions to
the grant of power, it would disparage
those rights which were not placed in
that enumeration; and it might follow
by implication, that those rights
which were not singled out, were
intended to be assigned into the hands
of the General Government, and were
consequently insecure. This is one of
the most plausible
arguments I have ever heard
against the admission of a bill of
rights into this system; but, I
conceive, that it may be guarded
against. I have attempted it, as
gentlemen may see by turning to the
last clause of the fourth resolution
[The Ninth Amendment].''
-- James Madison, June 8, 1789
"The
enumeration in the Constitution, of
certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage
others retained by the people."
-- Amendment IX, Constitution of the
United States
A Poem
Lost Rights
Bill of Rights
Bogus Rights
Bill of NO
Rights
Chodorov on Rights
IndividualRights.org
Some Crucial
Definitions
Rights are moral
principles
Individuals and Their
Rights
A "Right" to Health
Care ?
The U.N.'s Distortion of
Rights
The U.N. versus
Individual Rights
The Destruction of the Bill
of Rights
"The Planetary Bill of
Rights Project"
Russell Madden Takes on the
Rat Freaks
Stop calling things
"civil rights" when they're not.
Individual Rights (&
Personal Responsibility) Home
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"Over himself, over his own
mind and body, the individual is
sovereign." -- J.S. Mill, On Liberty,
1859, "Introductory"
"...every man has a property
in his own person. This nobody has any
right to but himself." -- John Locke
"There is no such
dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property
rights.' No human rights can exist without
property rights." -- Ayn Rand
"The notion of democracy is
founded on the premise that a majority can
give consent on behalf of the
minority. That's not consent, that's
forcible control. Nothing gives you
the right to consent for me to be robbed."
- Bradley Thomas
"From all which it is
evident, that though the things of
Nature are given in common, man (by
being master of himself, and
proprietor of his own person, and the
actions or labour of it) had still in
himself the great foundation of
property; and that which made up the
great part of what he applied to the
support or comfort of his being, when
invention and arts had improved the
conveniences of life, was perfectly
his own, and did not belong in common
to others." -- John Locke
"The highest manifestation
of life consists in this: that a being
governs its own actions. A thing
which is always subject to the
direction of another is somewhat of a
dead thing." -- Saint Thomas Aquinas
(who re-introduced Aristotle to
Western Civilization, eventually
leading to the Renaissance)
"[Art.] 2. [Natural Rights.]
All men have certain natural,
essential, and inherent rights - among
which are, the enjoying and defending
life and liberty; acquiring,
possessing, and protecting, property;
and, in a word, of seeking and
obtaining happiness. Equality of
rights under the law shall not be
denied or abridged by this state on
account of race, creed, color, sex or
national origin." -- New Hampshire
State Constitution, 1784
"In a new draft article, 'St. George Tucker’s
Second Amendment: Deconstructing
'The True Palladium of Liberty' [pdf],' Stephen P.
Halbrook takes the reader step-by-step
through Tucker's monumentally
influential annotated American
Blackstone, the most important
legal treatise of the Early Republic.
Analyzing Tucker's Blackstone, and
other writings by Tucker, Halbrook
shows that Tucker explicitly
recognized the Second Amendment as an
individual right, including the right
to posses firearms for personal
self-defense, unrelated to militia
duty." -- David Kopel
Some More Quotations about
Rights ... And
... More Articles on Rights
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