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"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."
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| "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 |
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-- Tibor Machan
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"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." |
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-- Leonard Peikoff, in "Health Care is Not a Right"
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"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
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| "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
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
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"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." -- Tibor Machan, Private Rights and PublicIllusions "If health care were a 'right' then somebody has to use an awful lot of force to enslave doctors, and the more highly skilled and proficient the doctors, the more force would be needed to make them serve whoever sets themselves up as their masters." -- Rick Gaber See how Americans were seduced into thinking someone else is supposed to pay for their health care HERE.
See: A "Right" to Health Care? HERE. "That certain people can even consider enslaving doctors to any degree without meeting any objection whatsoever only underscores the incredible depths to which the moral depravity of many American institutions, public, academic and journalistic, have sunk. Slavery is horrible enough, but putting our best, most highly-skilled, educated and thoughtful professionals at the mercy of the worst, most ethically-challenged depraved professionals such as politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers is worse than nauseating." -- Rick Gaber SEE: "If you want to see the future of health care in the United States just look at the VA hospitals today. ... The Washington Times is reporting that many veterans are waiting up to six months for an appointment to see a doctor. ... That, my friends, is your medical future … and it is your medical future because you have accepted the idea that you have a 'right' to medical care, a right that politicians are all-too-willing to recognize." HERE What letting politicians and bureaucrats interfere with health care has done so far is laid out graphically HERE. |
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| Publisher's Note (as what should be a totally unnecessary service) for the recently brainwashed: Wherever you see the words "man" or "men" in contexts such as the above, they are meant (as they have meant for centuries) only as synonyms for "human" or "humans," NOT as synonyms for "male" or "males." Likewise words such as "he," "him," "his," etc. are meant only as substitutes for "he or she," "him or her," "his or hers," etc. (Duh.) Failure to get past any insistence on contemporary "political correctness" or other dogma could cause you to miss out on history's richest and most inspiring motherlode of fundamental thinking on the concepts of freedom and the origins of human rights and human dignity. Including yours. Besides, it puts you in the ridiculous position of condoning (or even saying!) absurd things like, "Well, it can't possibly be true that the earth revolves around the sun because that was postulated by a white male sexist. Like maybe Copernicus." By the way, as Jane Chastain points out, have you noticed: the word "person" has the word "son" in it? And (as Bill Maher pointed out on Oct. 1, 1997) the word "woman" has the word "man" in it! Oh, horrors! What EVER shall we do NOW??? |
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