Gerrit Smith Quotes

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

One man’s right is every man’s right.

Freedom is partial to no race. Freedom has no religion. Freedom favors no ethnicity. Freedom discriminates not between rich and poor countries. Inevitably freedom will overwhelm Ethiopia.

If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.

... every man on the planet Has just as much right as yourself to the road.

Without equality, I say, there cannot be liberty.

There's not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

Minority rights have to be protected. That is America’s great contribution to the world.

Liberty: I hope to see the time when all mankind will enjoy its blessings.

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.

The much abused “shopkeepers” have abolished slavery and serfdom, made woman the companion of man with equal rights, proclaimed equality before the law and freedom of thought and opinion, declared war on war, abolished torture, and mitigated the cruelty of punishment. What cultural force can boast of similar achievements?

I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognize.

There is what I call the American idea. I so name it, because it seems to me to lie at the basis of all our truly original, distinctive, and American institutions. It is itself a complex idea, composed of three subordinate and more simple ideas, namely: The idea that all men have unalienable rights; that in respect thereof, all men are created equal; and that government is to be established and sustained for the purpose of giving every man an opportunity for the enjoyment and development of all these unalienable rights. This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy, that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom.

What is life without liberty; and what is liberty without equality of rights?

All men are created equal.

Everyone must have their rights, and in fact everyone gets their rights.

Give me the centralism of liberty; give me the imperialism of equal rights.

All men & women are created equal

Liberty is the right and hope of all humanity.

All the nations of the earth are crying out for liberty and equality. Away, away with tyranny and oppression!

Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.

At this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that liberty and justice for all is a desirable thing.

First there is the democratic idea: that all men are endowed by their creator with certain natural rights; that these rights are alienable only by the possessor thereof; that they are equal in men; that government is to organize these natural, unalienable and equal rights into institutions designed for the good of the governed, and therefore government is to be of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people. Here government is development, not exploitation.