Aristotle Quotes

Man is a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.

Humans are born with a hard-wired morality: a sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. I know this claim might sound outlandish, but it's supported now by research in several laboratories.

Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

The right to be free is a truth planted in the hearts of men, and acknowledged to be so by all that have harkened to the voice of nature.

Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

All men are free in a state of nature.

Every man has a right by nature to possess property as his own.

The philosophers, who have inquired into the foundations of society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of them has got there.

What is right is not derived from the rule, but the rule arises from our knowledge of what is right

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power. Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man and rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.

There is but one law for all … the law of nature.

Women to govern men, slaves freemen, are much in the same degree; all being total violations and perversions of the laws of nature and nations.

Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

… since the right of possessing goods privately has been conferred not by man's law, but by nature, public authority cannot abolish it, but can only control its exercise and bring it into conformity with the common weal

Remember, that they are of as good a kind as you; that is, they are reasonable creatures as well as you, and born to as much natural liberty. If their sin have enslaved them to you, yet Nature made them your equals.

Before the tribunal of nature, a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence, if he can find within himself the powers with which to do it.

The fact that natural-law theorists derive from the very nature of man a fixed structure of law independent of time and place, or of habit or authority or group norms, makes that law a mighty force for radical change.

The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.

Man can sin against nature in two ways. First, when he sins against his specific rational nature, acting contrary to reason. In this sense, we can say that every sin is a sin against man's nature, because it is against man's right reason.

The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.

There is no doctrine will do good where nature is wanting.