“The "rights of man" are the right of the less voracious to restrain those who are more so.”

"Balance Sheet On Our History," Quadrant (July 1993)

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Variant: Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: The question to be tried by you is whether a man has the right to express his honest thought; and for that reason there can be no case of greater importance submitted to a jury. And it may be well enough for me, at the outset, to admit that there could be no case in which I could take a greater — a deeper interest. For my part, I would not wish to live in a world where I could not express my honest opinions. Men who deny to others the right of speech are not fit to live with honest men.
I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips — to make the tongue a convict. I passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.
A man has a right to work with his hands, to plow the earth, to sow the seed, and that man has a right to reap the harvest. If we have not that right, then all are slaves except those who take these rights from their fellow-men.

1980s–1990s, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA241 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 241
1860s, Speech (October 1860)

1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
Context: The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, — Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws — Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe.

On Subsistence, (2 December 1792)