"6/24/95 Wendy Kaminer on Crime" (24 June 1995)
Context: Not everything that appears true is true. The ACLU is devoted to some very controversial principles — like the principle that everyone who is arrested should enjoy the same constitutional rights, regardless of their alleged crime or their character. We don't take that position to irritate people; we take that position because we believe in it. We believe in it, in part, in a spirit of enlightened self-interest, because the rights of each one of us are co-extensive with the rights of everyone who is arrested and prosecuted in the criminal courts. If we all don't enjoy the same rights, then no one enjoys any rights at all; some of us merely enjoy privilege.
As a nation we have made peace and war: as a nation we have vanquished our common enemies: as a nation we have formed alliances, and made treaties, and entered into various compacts and conventions with foreign States.
1780s, The Federalist Papers, Federalist No. 2 (1787)
Rudolf Rocker book Anarcho-Syndicalism
Source: Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), Ch. 5 "The Methods of Anarcho-Syndicalism"
Context: Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution. One compels respect from others when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being. This is not only true in private life, it has always been the same in political life as well.
The peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength.
Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron
King v. Reeves (1796), Peake's Nisi Prius Cases, 85.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to the One Hundred Sixty-fourth Ohio Regiment
Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect
Speech at the at the 74th UN General Assembly. Statement by Mr. Jair Messias Bolsonaro, President of the Federative Republic of Brazil http://statements.unmeetings.org/GA74/BR_EN.pdf. United Nations PaperSmart (24 September 2019).
Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Vietnamese communist leader and first president of Vietnam
"Report on the Draft Amended Constitution", (December 18, 1959)
1950's
“Let us greedily enjoy our friends, because we do not know how long this privilege will be ours.”
Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXIII
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Context: In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.
