Catharine MacKinnon Quotes

Equality and emancipation are required by the laws of humanity. These laws are not dependant on Judaism of Christianity because those laws and our claim are prior to both.

That means that every human being - without distinction of sex, age, race, skin color, language, religion, political view, or national or social origin - possesses an inalienable and untouchable dignity.

What world is there for us where our essential nature - and its right to live free - is one and the same?

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.

The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution -- an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd -- persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society -- a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members.

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

The natural law is, in essence, a profoundly 'radical' ethic, for it holds the existing status quo, which might grossly violate natural law, up to the unsparing and unyielding light of reason.

I don't believe that there are two sides to a story when it's a matter of right versus wrong. It just doesn't work that way.

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class. It is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

It is not force or fear, but belief in the inherent equality of man induces me to support this legislation.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.

The people are not satisfied with any form of government, or statute law, until it comes up to their sense of justice; so every progressive State revises its statutes from time to time, and at each revision comes nearer to the absolute right which human nature demands.

Man tends to treat all of his opinions as principles.

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.

We have to know that the bad guys are not different from us in the world.

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.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

People used to say I'm regional, but I'm not... We all have the same human condition.

I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.

Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

I don't believe so much in good and evil.

Individuals in the South are just like individuals any place else.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason that he is a man.