These natural rights quotes will inspire you. Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws, customs, or beliefs of any particular culture or government, and are therefore universal and inalienable (i.e., rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws).
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging natural rights quotes, natural rights sayings, and natural rights proverbs.
Best Natural Rights Quotes
- “We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.” ~ Voltaire
- “Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “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.” ~ Samuel Adams
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“All mankind… being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” ~ John Locke
- “All mankind… being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” ~ John Locke
- “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” ~ James Madison
- “Natural rights are those which always appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the rights of others.” ~ Thomas Paine
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“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind, the supreme being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beatifying that existence. He endowed him with rational faculties, by the help of which, to discern and pursue such things, as were consistent with his duty and interest, and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty, and personal safety.” ~ Alexander Hamilton
- “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.” ~ Lysander Spooner
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“Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge any one to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “Man’s rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.” ~ Samuel Adams
- “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” ~ James Madison
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.” ~ Jeremy Bentham
- “Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever” ~ Joseph Priestley
- “Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of … the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature. All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and ernter into another…. Now what liberty can there be where property is taken away without consent?” ~ Samuel Adams
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“Some other natural rights… [have] not yet entered into any declaration of rights.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “[If you understood the natural rights of mankind,] [y]ou would be convinced that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that, and cannot be wrested from any people without the most manifest violation of justice.” ~ Alexander Hamilton
- “I… [am] convinced [man] has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “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.” ~ Thomas Jefferson , Independence natural rights quotes
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“Therefore, states are equal in natural rights.” ~ William H. Seward
- “A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” ~ James Madison
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“The idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property.” ~ Samuel Adams
- “Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “It’s a difficult position. Do you endanger your child to fight for the right thing, or do you keep your mouth shut and let your child grow up in a world where their natural rights are stripped away from them?” ~ Jamie Bell
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“All… natural rights may be abridged or modified in [their] exercise by law.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.” ~ Marquis de Lafayette
- “The very idea of law originates in men’s natural rights. There is no other standard, than natural rights, by which civil law can be measured. Law has always been the name of that rule or principle of justice, which protects those rights. Thus we speak of natural law.” ~ Lysander Spooner
- “In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If ‘natural rights’ means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception.” ~ Clarence Darrow
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“A married woman has the same natural right to acquire and hold property, and to make all contracts that she is mentally competent to make reasonably, as has a married man, or any other man.” ~ Lysander Spooner
- “… the modern state masks itself in moral ideologies which obscure its actual conduct. One of the most compelling and insidious of these ideologies is the doctrine of natural rights. It was to secure these rights that the modern state was invented in the first place, and it is impossible, especially for Americans, not to be seduced by the doctrine. But it is nonetheless a philosophical superstition.” ~ Donald Livingston
- “The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.” ~ Albert J. Nock
- “Voting, the be all and end all of modern democratic politicians, has become a farce, if indeed it was ever anything else. By voting, the people decide only which of the oligarchs preselected for them as viable candidates will wield the whip used to flog them and will command the legion of willing accomplices and anointed lickspittles who perpetrate the countless violations of the people’s natural rights. Meanwhile, the masters soothe the masses by assuring them night and day that they – the plundered and bullied multitudes who compose the electorate – are themselves the government.” ~ Robert Higgs
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“To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question.” ~ Carl L. Becker
- “We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.” ~ John Trudell
- “The rights [to religious freedom] are of the natural rights of mankind, and … if any act shall be … passed to repeal [an act granting those rights] or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “We were born with natural rights. We don’t need civil rights. [African-Americans] don’t need civil rights. They don’t need them. They have inalienable rights granted by God in the Constitution. I mean, I’m discriminated against all the time. I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. [I’m discriminated against] because I’m old. I’m too old to get a job as a game show host. They say, well, the guy’s 71 and in five years he’ll be 76. And I’m a one per center, and I’m absolutely discriminated against as a one per center.” ~ Chuck Woolery
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“[The] prevailing reason at this time is, that the Act of Parliament is against the Magna Charta, and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.” ~ Thomas Hutchinson
- “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction – to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” ~ George Washington
- “If two individuals enter into a contract to commit trespass, theft, robbery or murder upon a third, the contract is unlawful and void, simply because it is a contract to violate natural justice, or men’s natural rights.” ~ Lysander Spooner
- “The 16th Amendment corroded the American concept of natural rights; ultimately reduced the American citizen to a status of subject, so much so that he is not aware of it; enhanced Executive power to the point of reducing Congress to innocuity; and enabled the central government to bribe the states, once independent units, into subservience. No kingship in the history of the world ever exercised more power than our Presidency, or had more of the people’s wealth at its disposal.” ~ Frank Chodorov
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“In speaking of natural rights, therefore, it is essential to remember that these alleged rights have no political force whatsoever, unless recognized and enforced by the state.” ~ Charles Edward Merriam
- “Nothing in the Constitution of the United States gives the Congress or the Executive Branch the power to attempt the task of regulating climate, as impossible as that would be under any realistic scenarios. No national security emergency exists relative to climate that would warrant increased governmental control of energy production. Today’s Americans have an obligation to future Americans to elect leaders who do not believe in an omnipotent government but believe, as did the Founders, in limited government, and in the preservation of liberty and the natural rights of the people.” ~ Harrison Schmitt
- “In your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.” ~ Susan B. Anthony
- “[O]ur rules can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
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“Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.” ~ Frederic Bastiat
- “Nobody needs to justify why they “need” a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can’t give away the rights of others because they’re not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “The Founders believed, and the Conservative agrees, in the dignity of the individual; that we, as human beings, have a right to live, live freely, and pursue that which motivates us not because man or some government says so, but because these are God-given natural rights.” ~ Mark Levin
- “Everyone has an equal and absolute right to sovereignty over his own body, his own property, and his own life, and to pursue his own happiness in any way that he chooses. No one has the authority to grant rights to anyone else, because human beings already possess all natural rights at birth. These rights include both personal and economic freedoms, and the only way they can be lost is if someone takes them away by force. The only right that an individual does not naturally possess is the right to violate someone else’s liberty.” ~ Robert Ringer
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“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” ~ George Washington
- “Ours is a representative republic with a Constitution in which is recognized the natural law and the natural rights of man. It is a republic with a spiritual foundation characterized by freedom – freedom for the individual and for his society.” ~ Ezra Taft Benson
- “[Louis Brandeis] believes in natural rights of speech and liberty and the right to pursue happiness.” ~ Jeffrey Rosen
- “For [Louis] Brandeis, it’s not a technical question of channeling what would James Madison say. It’s how do we take these inherent human natural rights of liberty and translate them into an age of new technolog” ~ Jeffrey Rosen
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“A human being has no natural rights of any nature.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
- “It [appears] that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature….Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind.” ~ Alexander Hamilton
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“The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a social right.” ~ James Madison
- “I consider the war of America against Britain as the country’s war, the public’s war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property.” ~ Thomas Paine
- “The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
