Tom Stoppard Quotes

Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.

Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution, or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

A human being has no natural rights of any nature.

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify a number of very horrendous things.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

All men are born equally free.

Our political and constitutional rights, so called, are but the natural and inherent rights of man, asserted, carried out, and secured by modes of human contrivance.

We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

Generous souls always interest themselves in the fate of a people who strive to recover the rights to which the Creator and Nature have entitled them, and one must indeed be wedded to error and passion not to harbor this noble sentiment

The yearnings of freedom are not a Western import; they are a human instinct.

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.

All men are free in a state of nature.

There is no right more fundamental than the right to be born and reared with all the dignity the human person deserves.

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.

The right to be a cussed fool Is safe from all devices human, It's common (ez a gin'I rule) To every critter born of woman.

Fundamental rights belong to the human being just because you are a human being.

Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity.

The principles on which we engaged, of which the charter of our independence is the record, were sanctioned by the laws of our being, and we but obeyed them in pursuing undeviatingly the course they called for. It issued finally in that inestimable state of freedom which alone can ensure to man the enjoyment of his equal rights.

Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!

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

All men are born free: just not for long.

I believe all Americans are born with certain inalienable rights. As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the constitution. My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not denied by any majority. My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator, and they represent the essence of human dignity.