Catholic Church Quotes

In this context, the church supports and favors every effort today to seek the full development of the personality of all human beings, and to promote their fundamental rights, their dignity and liberty.

The individual is prior to society and society must be ordered to the good of the individual.

Human beings the world over need freedom and security that they may be able to realize their full potential.

Primacy of persons over structures.

As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking—this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity.

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow …. Liberty … consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature …

The government is not best which secures mere life and property -- there is a more valuable thing -- manhood.

What makes America great was a government that was founded to be limited to doing one thing. I really believe the whole purpose of America, the aspirational value - why everybody who wants to come to this country wants to come here - was because we respected the dignity of every living person.

I'm a human being I'm not a piece of property. I am not a consignment of goods.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end.

I want anyone who believes in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to succeed. And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching Big Government that would stop your success, I want that organization, that element or that person to fail. I want you to succeed.

Every man has the right to life, to bodily integrity.

For us democracy is a question of human dignity. And human dignity is political freedom.

Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.

Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.

Moral principles of liberty that endow a person with the right to claim and acquire property at the same time oblige that person to respect every other person’s equal right to do the same.

All the political rights and liberties which people enjoy today, they do not owe to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

What makes America unique in the world is the idea of the self-directed life.

We are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as human beings. We are fighting for human rights.

The individual is greater than the state.

Liberty is an individual, not a collective, right.

Liberty is a right which every individual must be ready to vindicate for himself, and which he who pretends to bestow as a favor, has by that very act in reality denied. Even political establishments, though they appear to be independent of the will and arbitration of men, cannot be relied on for the preservation of freedom; they may nourish, but should not supersede that firm and resolute spirit, with which the liberal mind is always prepared to resist indignities, and to refer its safety to itself.