Gerrit Smith Quotes

The whole of the Bill is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.

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.

No doubt that a great deal of nonsense has been written about the “unalienable rights of individuals.”

It is a natural impossibility for any man to make a binding contract, by which he shall surrender to others a single one of what are commonly called his 'natural, inherent, inalienable rights.'

Therefore, states are equal in natural rights.

Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature's God, not from government.

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.

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

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property.

The Declaration of Independence... is the declaratory charter of our rights, and of the rights of man

We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property.

The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states, and the organic laws of the territories all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.

I believe that, as Americans, our freedoms come from God and not government, and include the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is part of our constitutional rights and it belongs to everybody.

It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free.

Our rights come from God - not man, not a monarch, not a government.

A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.

There is only one kind of freedom and that's individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.

You don't have freedom because you are a hyphenated American; you have freedom because you are an individual, and that should be protected.

The right of liberty is God-given and immortal. It cannot be regulated. Or controlled. It cannot be banned. And it must not be restricted.

But today, government is taking those rights from us, pretending that it gives us our rights. Indeed, those rights come from God, and it was recognized throughout our history as such.

It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men's property, which they had not before, as individuals.

The common Notions of Liberty are not from School Divines, but from Nature.

It was once a fundamental maxim that every subject had the same right to his life, liberty, property, and the law that the King had to his crown; and 'tis yet, I venture to say, as much as a crown is worth, to deny the subject his law, which is his birthright.

Nothing... is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.