rights

The police can use violence to say, expel citizens from a public park because they are enforcing duly constituted laws. Laws gain their legitimacy from the Constitution. The Constitution gains its legitimacy from something called 'the people.' But how did 'the people' actually grant legitimacy to the Constitution? As the American and French revolutions make clear: basically, through acts of illegal violence. So what gives the police the right to use force to suppress the very thing__ popular uprising__hat granted them their right to use force to begin with?

If not us, then who? Who's going to stand when everyone else kneels? Who's going to argue for the law even when there's no justice to be had? Who's going to try even when the trying is too damn hard?

For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.

In the ideal state, laws are few and simple. In the corrupt state, they are many and confused.

The rights of the individual are more important than the wishes of the masses.

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they__e treated as public nuisances and evicted.

We, the Hawaiian people, who are born from the union of Papahanaumoku and Wakea, earth mother and sky father, and who have lived in these islands for over 100 generations, will always have the moral right to the lands of Hawai'i now and forever, no matter what any court says.

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.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

I am not interested in having freedom from burdens. I don't need any authority to free me from responsibility.I am not interested in having freedoms within an authoritarian's parameters. I am only interested in self-determination.I have only respect for liberty as I am a libertarian.

Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage.

Accepting necessary conflicts for the sake of improving the lives of children is the only fundamental moral crusade that matters.

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.

What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced society is not, strictly speaking, a political one, that is today, it is not concerned with human beings as persons and citizens, but with human bodies. ... In all technologically advanced countries today, whatever political label they give themselves, their policies have, essentially, the same goal: to guarantee to every member of society, as a psychophysical organism, the right to physical and mental health.

Independence that has declared its __ndependence_ from the sure and certain compass of sound morals is nothing more than rogue greed having scantily dressed itself in the garb of independence while running off the cliff of anarchy.

The assumption of __ights_ is the cancer of privilege.

Rights_ are __rivileges,_ and if I am arrogant enough to demand the former without respecting the latter I will lose both.

Liberty is a constant battle between government; who would limit it, people; who would concede it, and patriots; who would defend it.