Browsing Topic Best Natural Rights Quotes

Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.

Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind, the supreme being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beatifying that existence. He endowed him with rational faculties, by the help of which, to discern and pursue such things, as were consistent with his duty and interest, and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty, and personal safety.

Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature….Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind.

From a biological viewpoint, patriarchal religion denied women the natural rights of every other mammalian female: the right to choose her stud, to control the circumstances of her mating, to occupy and govern her own nest, or to refuse all males when preoccupied with the important business of raising her young.

[If you understood the natural rights of mankind,] [y]ou would be convinced that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that, and cannot be wrested from any people without the most manifest violation of justice.

The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

In speaking of natural rights, therefore, it is essential to remember that these alleged rights have no political force whatsoever, unless recognized and enforced by the state.

Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge any one to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.

To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question.

We were born with natural rights. We don’t need civil rights. [African-Americans] don’t need civil rights. They don’t need them. They have inalienable rights granted by God in the Constitution. I mean, I’m discriminated against all the time. I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. [I’m discriminated against] because I’m old. I’m too old to get a job as a game show host. They say, well, the guy’s 71 and in five years he’ll be 76. And I’m a one per center, and I’m absolutely discriminated against as a one per center.

In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If ‘natural rights’ means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

The 16th Amendment corroded the American concept of natural rights; ultimately reduced the American citizen to a status of subject, so much so that he is not aware of it; enhanced Executive power to the point of reducing Congress to innocuity; and enabled the central government to bribe the states, once independent units, into subservience. No kingship in the history of the world ever exercised more power than our Presidency, or had more of the people’s wealth at its disposal.

Ours is a representative republic with a Constitution in which is recognized the natural law and the natural rights of man. It is a republic with a spiritual foundation characterized by freedom – freedom for the individual and for his society.

… the modern state masks itself in moral ideologies which obscure its actual conduct. One of the most compelling and insidious of these ideologies is the doctrine of natural rights. It was to secure these rights that the modern state was invented in the first place, and it is impossible, especially for Americans, not to be seduced by the doctrine. But it is nonetheless a philosophical superstition.

What, then, do they want a government for? Not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion, not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man — to protect person and property — to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak — in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not to be allowed to do more.

A natural right in the strict sense is that which is naturally under a person’s control, his body with its faculties of movement, feeling, thought, and speech. By extension, a natural right is what a person brings under his control without violating any other person’s natural rights.

Nothing in the Constitution of the United States gives the Congress or the Executive Branch the power to attempt the task of regulating climate, as impossible as that would be under any realistic scenarios. No national security emergency exists relative to climate that would warrant increased governmental control of energy production. Today’s Americans have an obligation to future Americans to elect leaders who do not believe in an omnipotent government but believe, as did the Founders, in limited government, and in the preservation of liberty and the natural rights of the people.

The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a social right.

For [Louis] Brandeis, it’s not a technical question of channeling what would James Madison say. It’s how do we take these inherent human natural rights of liberty and translate them into an age of new technolog

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

All mankind… being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.

We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.

Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever

How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we may now expect to see, not only in theory and in books but in actual practice, calculated for the general good, and taking no more upon it than the general good requires, leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with men’s notions concerning God, and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

[Louis Brandeis] believes in natural rights of speech and liberty and the right to pursue happiness.

How idle is this prating about natural rights as though still containing all that had been forfeited.

A human being has no natural rights of any nature.

[The] prevailing reason at this time is, that the Act of Parliament is against the Magna Charta, and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.

The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.

Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them.

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.