#rig

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." (1962) ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#political-rights #protest #revolution #violence #violence

A free people ought...to be armed ↗

— George Washington

#right-to-bear-arms #second-amendment #free

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story? ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#cruelty #violence

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. ↗

— Evelyn Beatrice Hall

#defend #disapprove #i #right #say

[Lighting a cigarette] Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned. ↗

— Frank Zappa

#morality #rights #smoking #democracy

People use democracy as a free-floating abstraction disconnected from reality. Democracy in and of itself is not necessarily good. Gang rape, after all, is democracy in action. All men have the right to live their own life. Democracy must be rooted in a rational philosophy that first and foremost recognizes the right of an individual. A few million Imperial Order men screaming for the lives of a much smaller number of people in the New World may win a democratic vote, but it does not give them the right to those lives, or make their calls for such killing right. Democracy is not a synonym for justice or for freedom. Democracy is not a sacred right sanctifying mob rule. Democracy is a principle that is subordinate to the inalienable rights of the individual. ↗

— Terry Goodkind

#human-rights #freedom

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss. ↗

— Michael Chabon

#cliche #novels #originality #writing #influence

Women are only children of a larger growth. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters. ↗

— Philip Stanhope

#child #children #consults #does #flatters

If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law. ↗

— Lysander Spooner

#authorize #government #judge #jury #justice

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#i #ours #planet #poor #really