Noun
The rights that can reasonably be expected by any citizen.
(US) Those rights which are guaranteed protection by the US Constitution and are considered to be unquestionable, deserved by all people under all circumstances, especially without regard to race, creed, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and disability.
Source: en.wiktionary.orgI favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary. Ronald Reagan
He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights... it had to be some silly little Communist. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ronald Reagan
The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything. Carol Moseley Braun
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious. H. L. Mencken
It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights. Tariq Ali