Excerpts from The Rights Revolution, by Michael Ignatieff
House of Ananasi Press Limited, 2001.
"Rights alone cannot create community feeling - you need a common history and shared experience for that. But living in a rights culture can deepen one component of community, which is trust. It's not full loving trust of the kind you get in good families or happy marriages. A rights culture is properly poised between faith and suspicion: we trust each other just enough to argue out our differences, but not so much as to forget the possibility that others may be tempted to tread upon our rights." (p. 33)
"Human-rights commitments are on the outermost arc of our obligations, but they can be only as strong as our innermost commitments." (p. 41)
"To believe in rights is to believe in defending difference." (p. 53)
"Rights are not abstractions. They are the very heart of our community and the very core of our values. We have them because those who went before us fought for them, and in some cases died for them. Our commitment to rights is a commitment to our ancestors. We owe it to them to maintain the vitality of the right to dissent, the right to belong, and the right to be different." (p. 54)
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