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About this quote

What does it mean?
Debs states that the rights of a single person hold the same value as the rights of many.
In plain terms
One person rights are as important as a million rights.
What can you take from it?
Individual rights matter as much as collective rights.

Where it applies

  • legal systems
  • policy making
  • activism

Putting it to work

  • defend individual rights
  • support justice
  • protect minorities

Questions to consider

  • How do we protect individual rights in groups?
  • When do collective needs outweigh individual ones?

Another view

Rights may conflict in practice requiring balancing.

More from Eugene V. Debs

  1. People are never quite so strange to each other as when they are forced into artificial, crowded and stifled relationship. I would rather be friendless out on …

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  2. If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discon…

    Permalink to quote #37
  3. Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself, but because I am not s…

    Permalink to quote #34

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