Right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

Definition and stakes

The theme of “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has been addressed by authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mon Droit, Alpheus Henry Snow and Robert Green Ingersoll. It is often associated with terms like rights, equality, law, society and freedom.

Quotes about “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”

Manuel L. Quezon, Fourth State of the Nation Address

“ For of what practical value can the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” be to a person, if he does not actually enjoy it and his only freedom consists in the freedom to starve or die? ”

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Source: Wikisource

Jacob Abbott, Richard II

“ All men—the doctrine is simply—have an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even when all are in the full enjoyment of their rights, different men will, of course, attain to very different degrees of advancement in the objects of their desire. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

George Barton, Angels of the Battlefield

“ No obstacle to the unfettered enjoyment of those rights which we possess from God in the natural law, and that are guaranteed to us in the Constitution and laws of the land—the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

American Anti-Slavery Society, The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

“ Such attributes, endlessly varied and diversified, proceed from the basis of a common character, by virtue of which all men and each--one as truly as another--are entitled, as a birth-right, to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Thomas Nelson Page, John Marvel, Assistant

“ If they were entitled to life, neither nature nor the law would deprive them of it—if to liberty, neither could interfere with it—if to the pursuit of happiness, we should have to reconstruct their minds. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II

“ Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and, in the pursuit of happiness, all avocations, all honors, all positions, are alike open to every one; and in the protection of these rights all are equal before the law. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Amanda M. Douglas, A Little Girl in Old Detroit

“ It is as if he said, 'I will conquer the new world by force of industry; there shall be equal rights to homes, to labor, to'—there is a curious and delightful sounding sentence in their Declaration, which is a sort of corner stone—'life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.' One man's idea of happiness is quite different from another's, however ”

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Source: Gutenberg

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