rights

Yes, the state must intervene to prevent the exploitation of poor Indian women who are enticed or coerced into surrogacy, as well as to protect the rights of surrogate children. However, it should also be empathetic to individuals with alternative lifestyles who are well within their legal and human rights to demand access to surrogacy services.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot.

Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society... It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.

If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.

Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

I'd say that animal rights and environmental issues have always been at the forefront of my mind.

Urban residents, most of them middle class, have a much better sense of their environmental rights, and they're willing to take to the streets.

I've been active in animal rights and all kinds of environmental stuff and children's charities over the years.

I have voted against only one of President Obama's nominees: Michael Froman, a Citigroup alumnus who is currently storming the halls of Congress as U.S. Trade Representative pushing trade deals that threaten to undermine financial regulation, workers' rights, and environmental protections.

Without global human rights, labor and environmental movements, companies would still be hiring 12-year-olds as a matter of course and poisoning our groundwater without batting an eyelid.

What I remain opposed to is the idea that David Cameron could go around and give up workers' rights, give up environmental protection, give up a whole load of things that are very important.

I'm such an advocate for animal rights and environmental rights.

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.

Men have as exaggerated an idea of their rights as women have of their wrongs.

The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.

Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is__ot that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.

I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.