 Freedom
Keys
a
collection of amusing,
fascinating,
insightful, or
maybe
even useful information |
|
|
About Rights
"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.
"Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation
of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.
"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
"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
"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, nomatter 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
| "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
| 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 majoritty 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
| "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 |
|
...
| "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 |
|
|
|
|
| "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 Page
"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
"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
|
