Natural Rights Quotes

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.

A human being has no natural rights of any nature.

It's a difficult position. Do you endanger your child to fight for the right thing, or do you keep your mouth shut and let your child grow up in a world where their natural rights are stripped away from them?

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

Therefore, states are equal in natural rights.

All... natural rights may be abridged or modified in [their] exercise by law.

Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established.

The very idea of law originates in men's natural rights. There is no other standard, than natural rights, by which civil law can be measured. Law has always been the name of that rule or principle of justice, which protects those rights. Thus we speak of natural law.

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

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.

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

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

The idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.

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.

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.

Some other natural rights... [have] not yet entered into any declaration of rights.

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

First there is the democratic idea: that all men are endowed by their creator with certain natural rights; that these rights are alienable only by the possessor thereof; that they are equal in men; that government is to organize these natural, unalienable and equal rights into institutions designed for the good of the governed, and therefore government is to be of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people. Here government is development, not exploitation.

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.

I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

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

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

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.

Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.

A married woman has the same natural right to acquire and hold property, and to make all contracts that she is mentally competent to make reasonably, as has a married man, or any other man.

If two individuals enter into a contract to commit trespass, theft, robbery or murder upon a third, the contract is unlawful and void, simply because it is a contract to violate natural justice, or men's natural rights.

[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.

In your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor's verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.

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.

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

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.

Nobody needs to justify why they "need" a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can't give away the rights of others because they're not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of ... the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature. All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and ernter into another.... Now what liberty can there be where property is taken away without consent?

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.

Man's rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Just as the white man and every other person on this earth has God-given rights, natural rights, civil rights, any kind of rights that you can think of, when it comes to defending himself, black people - we should have the right to defend ourselves also.

And these great natural rights may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man's natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense.

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.

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.

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

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.

It is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.

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

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.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

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

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 short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property.

A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.