Midterm Quotes Flashcards
“The paradox is that rights that entail some specification of our suffering, injury, or inequality lock us into the identity defined by our subordination, and rights that eschew this specificity not only sustain the invisibility of our subordination but potentially even enhance it.”
Wendy Brown
“that which we cannot not want.”
Gayatri Spivak (Quoted in Brown)
“Man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated, completely isolated individual, who carried his dignity within himself without reference to some larger encompassing order, when he disappeared again into a member of a people. From the beginning, the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an ‘abstract’ human being who seemed to exist nowhere.”
Hannah Arendt
“The question of human rights became quickly attached to question of national emancipation: only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own people, seemed able to ensure them.”
Hannah Arendt
But it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.”
Hannah Arendt
“Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as a man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.”
Hannah Arendt
“No transboundary legal or moral standards exist against which human rights practices may be judged acceptable or unacceptable”
Fernando Teson
“To say that a man gives himself for nothing is to say what is absurd and inconceivable; such an act is illegitimate and invalid, for the simple reason that he who performs it is not in his right mind. To say the same thing of the whole nation is to suppose a nation of fools; and madness does not confer rights…
To renounce one’s liberty is to renounce one’s quality as a man, the rights and also the duties of humanity – for him who renounces everything, there is no possible compensation.”
Rousseau
“To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
US declaration of Independence
“The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it,
which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law,
teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being
all equal and independent, no one ought to harm
another in his life, health, liberty or possession”
Locke
“What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an
unlimited right to anything which tempts him and which he is able
to attain: what he gains is civil liberty and property in all that he
possesses.”
Rousseau
“Every man has a property in his own person. This
nobody has a right to but himself.”
Locke
“Under conditions of general equality, “the
condition of man..is a condition of war of every
one against every one, in which every one is
governed by his own reason…[I]n such a
condition every man has a right to everything,
even to another’s body. And therefore, as long
as this natural right of every man to everything
endureth, there can be no security to any man”
(Hobbes, 62).
(In the state of nature) “there is no propriety, no
dominion, no ‘mine’ and ‘thine distinct.’”
Hobbes
- “The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it,
which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law,
teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being
all equal and independent, no one ought to harm
another in his life, health, liberty or possession”
Locke
