A Quote by Gerrit Smith

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.

Gerrit Smith

Quote Topics

Carried Constitutional Constitutional Right Constitutional Rights Human Inherent Man Modes Natural Our Out Political Rights Secured

Quote Author

Gerrit Smith
American - Politician
March 6, 1797 - December 28, 1874

I published a thesis about animal rights when I was studying in England in 1991. Back then, I was a human rights lawyer and people condemned me for talking about animal rights when human rights are still not guaranteed. However, human rights are guaranteed in a society where animal rights are secured.

Park Won-soon

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

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.'

Lysander Spooner

In the year 2010, Kenya adopted a new constitution. With that constitution, we further secured the human rights and civil liberties of our citizens and entrenched constitutional governance and justice.

Mwai Kibaki

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

The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.

Thomas Paine

The big issue is this incremental whittling away of our constitutional rights, our most important constitutional rights, including freedom of speech. This is something that we really have to put our foot down on, and we have to fight it at every step of the way.

John Kiriakou

Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth.

Malcolm X

President Bush has asserted the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on any American without a warrant in the name of fighting terrorism. He has asserted presidential power beyond stated constitutional rights, and there is no Republican gutsy enough to call his hand.

Helen Thomas

Just as the white man and every other person on this earth has God-given rights, natural rights, civil rights, any kind of rights that you can think of, when it comes to defending himself, black people - we should have the right to defend ourselves also.

Malcolm X

Look at what I've done my entire life. I have been working on behalf of civil rights, women's rights, human rights for years and I know how challenging it is to change our political system and I have the highest regard for those who have put themselves on the line.

Hillary Clinton

Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured

Thomas Paine

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

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.

Tom Stoppard

The entire future of marriage rests with Justice Anthony Kennedy, the man who declared in Citizens United that corporations are people with constitutional rights. I just hope he doesn't do anything rash, like declare that homosexuals are people with constitutional rights.