Inalienable right

“ Why should property, contrary to the interests of the proprietor, be exempt from sale, receive instruction, give testimony in court, hold estate, preserve family ties, be loved as the owner loves himself, in fine, enjoy all or any of the "inalienable rights" of man? ”

“ Those rights are inalienable, shorn of which a man cannot work out his last end. Some rights are thus permanently and universally inalienable, as the right to life: others are so occasionally and for particular persons. ”

“ Over all and above all these there rises the great American political idea, a "self-evident truth"—which cannot be proved—it needs no proof; it is anterior to demonstration; namely, that every man is endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights, and in these rights all men are equal ”

“ The Declaration does not contemplate that all government must have the consent of the governed. It announces that man's "inalienable rights are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are established among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that when any form of government becomes destructive of those rights, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are the important things ”

“ For what can be more irrational and inconsistent than to be able to refuse our assent to what is evidently true to us, and to assent to what we see to be evidently false, and thereby inwardly give the lie to the understanding?
3. Were Liberty defined [4] a power to will evil (knowing it to be evil) as well as good; that would be an imperfection in man, considered as a sensible being, if it be an imperfection in such a being to be miserable. For willing evil is choosing to be miserable, and bringing knowingly destruction on ourselves. ”

“ To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him, must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. ”

“ The effect of ignorance of the causes of right, equity, law, and justice, is to make custom and example the rule of actions, as with children, or to induce the setting of custom against reason, and reason against custom, whereby the doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen, and by the sword. ”

“ It is a most dreadful doctrine; utterly false! Has a legislator, Pharaoh, Darius, Herod, Henry the Eighth, a single tyrant, any moral right to repudiate God, and declare himself not amenable to the moral law of the universe? You all answer, No! Have ten millions of men out of nineteen millions in America a right to do this? Has any man a moral right to repudiate justice and declare himself not amenable to conscience and to God? Where did he get the right to invade the conscience of mankind? Is it because he is legislator, magistrate, governor, president, king? a right to do wrong! ”

“ We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of man, that pants for distinction. This principle operates in every bosom, and when kept under the control of reason, and the influence of humanity, it produces the most benevolent effects. But when the checks of conscience are thrown aside, or the moral sense weakened by the sudden acquisition of wealth or power, humanity is obscured, and if a favorable coincidence of circumstances permits, this love of distinction often exhibits the most mortifying instances of profligacy, tyranny, and the wanton exercise of arbitrary sway. ”

“ Why should we be deceived by the sophistry of those whose interest it is to gloss over iniquity, and who from long habit have learned to believe that it is no iniquity? It is a very simple process to judge rightly in this matter. Just ask yourself the question where you could find a set of men, in whose power you would be willing to place yourself, if the laws allowed them to sin against you with impunity? ”

“ Who, then, are the worst enemies of the liberty of man? First, that ignorance and error which prevent him from distinguishing clearly that which is just and right from that which is evil and false. Secondly, his passions, which keep him from embracing the good which he knows and sees, and induce him to desire that which he knows to be bad. Thirdly, any powers or authorities external to man, which prevent him from doing that which he knows to be good and which he desires to do, or force him to do that which he sees to be unlawful, and which he shrinks from doing. ”

“ All this I own to be absurd; and I aver it to be at least as absurd to affirm, that the person accused is to be the decisive judge of his own actions, when it is certain that he will always judge and determine in his own favour; and thus the whole race of mankind will be left helpless under the heaviest injustice, oppression, and misery, that can afflict human nature. ”

“ And so the question arises, Whence shall the conscience of the ruler-man derive its distinctions between the Right and the Wrong? The arch-iconoclast brusquely stifles this naive query beforehand by assuring us that such distinctions in their accepted sense do not exist for personages of that grander stamp. Heedless of the time-hallowed concepts that all men share in common, he enjoins mastermen to take their position uncompromisingly outside the confining area of conventions, in the moral independence that dwells "beyond good and evil." ”

“ Why is not the wolf or the bear morally responsible? Why is every other creature incapable of sin? Simply because man alone is endowed with what belongs to no other creature—a moral sense—the power to discriminate and the liberty to choose between justice and injustice, right and wrong; or in other words, with the faculties of rationality and liberty, which alone distinguish him from the brute creation and make him man. ”

“ No amount of form or theory, however just in appearance, or legal in fact, will condone unjust government. And as we would wish to be condemned and punished were we so to impose on others—so must we act towards any government which seeks to impose on us by substituting form for substance. If its moral sanction is imperfect it cannot claim perfect obedience. ”

“ He is there to 'represent to the eye,' because impressions on the senses are more effective than abstract statements, the divine right and sovereignty, the majesty of the COMMON-weal, the rule that protects each helpless individual member of it with the strength of all, the rule awful with great nature's sanction, enforced with her dire pains and penalties. He is there that you may see whether that is it, or not; that one poor wretch, that thing of pity, which has no power to protect itself, in whom the law itself, the sovereignty of reason, is dethroned. ”

“ None but those who do not care about opinions, will confound this with intolerance. Those, who having opinions which they hold to be immensely important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful, have any deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as a class and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right, and right what they think wrong: though they need not therefore be, nor was my father, insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed in their estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead of by the whole of their character. ”

“ Even such free-will as the human mind possesses is a power of his own deliberate bestowal; and the whole extent of its disastrous mistakes, its deluded estimates, its degrading preferences, its faithless abuse of liberty, must be considered as ordained and introduced by him for some ultimate and transcendent good. ”

“ Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.
When we consider either the history of opinion, or the ordinary conduct of human life, to what is it to be ascribed that the one and the other are no worse than they are? Not certainly to the inherent force of the human understanding ”

“ In order more fully to illustrate the mischief of denying a hearing to opinions because we, in our own judgment, have condemned them, it will be desirable to fix down the discussion to a concrete case; and I choose, by preference, the cases which are least favourable to me—in which the argument against freedom of opinion, both on the score of truth and on that of utility, is considered the strongest. Let the opinions impugned be the belief in a God and in a future state, or any of the commonly received doctrines of morality. ”

“ SUCH being the reasons which make it imperative that human beings should be free to form opinions, and to express their opinions without reserve; and such the baneful consequences to the intellectual, and through that to the moral nature of man, unless this liberty is either conceded, or asserted in spite of prohibition; let us next examine whether the same reasons do not require that men should be free to act upon their opinions—to carry these out in their lives, without hindrance, either physical or moral, from their fellow-men, so long as it is at their own risk and peril. ”

“ It was also shown that the existence of rationality and liberty implies the possibility of evil; for evil, as there defined, is in itself simply a perverted and disordered state of mind; — and moral liberty implies the power so to pervert the mind, if one will. This being so, the great purpose of the Divine Being, in His dealings with man, is — while leaving his moral freedom inviolable — still gently to bend him to good. This cannot be done violently and forcibly, for that would. be a contradiction: to leave man free and to force him are plainly contradictory. ”

“ We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society ”

“ If all men are not created equal in attributes of body and mind, then the inequality may be so great that such men cannot be endowed with right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, unalienable save in their consent; then government over such men cannot rightfully rest upon their consent ”

“ I readily grant that this ideal sentiment of legal right, possessed by the person by whom the wounding of the feeling of legal right is felt more sensitively than an attack upon him personally, and who disinterestedly sacrifices himself in the interest of oppressed right as if there were question only of his own rights, is the privilege of highly gifted natures. ”

“ But whatever may be the cause of that weakness of character which the love of ease induces to evade the struggle for legal right, all we have to do here is to recognize it and to describe it as it is. What is the practical philosophy of life which it preaches but the policy of the coward? ”

“ To what extremes are the passions of the human mind liable, when neither the true light of the understanding nor any right sense of justice guide them! We see this in ignorant and unprincipled individuals, who suddenly rush out of their thraldom and pupilage into liberty and licensciousness; we see the same thing exhibited by p. 144agitated and wicked masses, as in the French Revolution, when the moral, like the physical ocean, is let loose from its order and control, and heaves its tumultuous waves of passion, as if by an earthquake, from one overwhelming extreme to another. ”

“ That the motive theory of the will is true is admitted in practice by all. The Indeterminist admits it even in his appeal to "Liberty." He is counting upon the desire for freedom (sociologically) as being strong enough to lead people to reject a theory which denies its applicability to morals. ”

“ But when the philosopher and philanthropist contemplates the universe, when he perceives existing evils that admit of amendment, and hears tell of other evils, which, in the course of sixty centuries, may again derange the system of happiness which the amendment is calculated to produce, does he submit to prolong a positive evil, because, if that were eradicated, after a millennium of 6000 years (for such space of time would it take to people the earth) another evil would take place?
To how contemptible a degradation of grossest credulity will not prejudice lower the human mind! ”

“ If there is one subject in this world worthy of being discussed, worthy of being understood, it is the question of intellectual liberty. Without that, we are simply painted clay; without that, we are poor, miserable serfs and slaves. If you have not the right to express your opinions, if the defendant has not this right, then no man ever walked beneath the blue of heaven that had the right to express his thought. If others claim the right, where did they get it? ”

“ The right is that which is allowable, or that which may be practiced with impunity. The wrong is that which is forbidden or punishable. Of course, this attitude toward moral values should not continue through life. ”

“ Other persons, again, hold the directly contrary opinion, that any law, judged to be bad, may blamelessly be disobeyed, even though it be not judged to be unjust, but only inexpedient; while others would confine the licence of disobedience to the case of unjust laws: but again, some say, that all laws which are inexpedient are unjust; since every law imposes some restriction on the natural liberty of mankind, which restriction is an injustice, unless legitimated by tending to their good. ”

“ There are, indeed, some ad herents of Liberalism who do not subscribe to these opinions, which we have seen to be fearful in their enormity, openly opposed to the truth, and the cause of most terrible evils. Indeed, very many amongst them, compelled by the force of truth, do not hesitate to admit that such liberty is vicious, nay, is simple license, whenever intemperate in its claims, to the neglect of truth and justice; and therefore they would have liberty ruled and directed by right reason, and consequently subject to the natural law and to the divine eternal law. ”