Quotes About Life Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness

“USA drone attacks are a crime against humanity, We Need Humanity , More than Cleverness, We need kindness, We need all of Human qualities more than USA definition.. U.S.A Drone Program Needs to Be Accompanied by Hard Facts on Civilian Deaths.USA Added Black Pages To History Of Humanity.It should be noted as dangerous for Human Kind, human rights ,rights of life liberty and pursuit of happiness .”

— Suraj

“It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?”

— Chris Gardner

“From the beginning, Judeo-Christian principles have been the foundation for American public dialogue and government policy. They serve as the solid basis for political activism in support of a better socioeconomic environment. Found in American homes, truth from the Hebrew Christian Bible has enabled individual liberty to prevail over secular empires because it is a practical message about reality from man's Creator.
In their quest for liberty, Americans focused upon the conspicuously self-evident "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." It is the governing character of these principles (laws), such as humility, the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, that leads to success. This is the sure foundation upon which man's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" rests. Called "virtue" by America's Founding Fathers, the impartial and divine element frees man to do what is right. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Cor. 3:17).”

— David A. Norris

“Today everybody is talking about the fact that we live in one world; because of globalization, we are all part of the same planet. They talk that way, but do they mean it? We should remind them that the words of the Declaration [of Independence] apply not only to people in this country, but also to people all over the world. People everywhere have the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When the government becomes destructive of that, then it is patriotic to dissent and to criticize - to do what we always praise and call heroic when we look upon the dissenters and critics in totalitarian countries who dare to speak out.”

— Howard Zinn

“We have forgotten what Thomas Jefferson told us in 1776: that we are endowed by the Creator "with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Not happiness, mind you, but its pursuit. By implication Jefferson warned that if you pursue happiness for someone else, you deny him the right to pursue it on his own.”

— John Rosemond

“If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.”

— Terence McKenna

“So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the Captial of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!”

— Solomon Northup

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ... but only when you pay your taxes? That means your freedom is rented, leased, & not unalienable.”

— Steve Maraboli

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government ...”

— Thomas Jefferson

“I want anyone who believes in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to succeed. And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching Big Government that would stop your success, I want that organization, that element or that person to fail. I want you to succeed.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“The People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

— Frank Norris

“Democracy rests upon two pillars: one, the principle that all men are equally entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and the other, the conviction that such equal opportunity will most advance civilization.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

“Surely, if it is the right of the people to "alter or abolish," it is their right to criticize, even severely, policies they believe destructive of the ends for which government has been established. This principle, in the Declaration of Independence, suggests that true patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. When our government compromises, undermines, or attacks those values, it is being unpatriotic.”

— Howard Zinn

“The government is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend everyone's equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when the government does not fulfill that obligation, it is the right of the people, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, to 'alter or abolish' the government.”

— Howard Zinn

“The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate ... is a totalitarian's dream.”

— Steven Pinker

“We were endowed by our Creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We were not endowed by the Federal Government. We were not endowed by entitlements. We were not endowed by pork barrel spending; we were not endowed by budgetary earmarks.”

— Lawrence Kudlow

“For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.”

— Jimmy Carter

“It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator.”

— Tom Stoppard

“The Declaration calls us to recognize the inherent equality of all people. And when it becomes unmistakably evident that a government is denying the governed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it's the right of people to establish a new government to secure these unalienable rights.”

— Mike Crapo

“People truly reaching across boundaries - be they religious or race, political or geographic. A state that is sincerely civil and respectful of each individual's pathway toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be our goal.”

— Jon Huntsman, Jr.

“The "pursuit of happiness" is such a key element of the "American (ideological) dream" that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: "We holds 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." Where did the somewhat awkward "pursuit of happiness" come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property- the latter was replaced by "the pursuit of happiness" during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves' right to property.”

— Slavoj Žižek

“Our democracy is dependent on people who passionately cherish the ideals of a democracy. Every man is created equal with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's a wonderful idea, and it takes people who cherish that idea to be actively involved in the process.”

— George Takei

“The Constitution guarantees us our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. It doesn't guarantee our rights to charity.”

— Jesse Ventura

“Wrong is because it is the taking of a life. When you take someone's life, you also take away their right to liberty and their pursuit of happiness. If you take someone's life, you also take their dream, their future, their family, their career, and their children away from them. All other rights are lost when you take away the right to life.”

— Tony Evans

“More than a decade ago, a Supreme Court decision literally wiped off the books of fifty states statutes protecting the rights of unborn children. Abortion on demand now takes the lives of up to 1.5 million unborn children a year. Human life legislation ending this tragedy will some day pass the Congress, and you and I must never rest until it does. Unless and until it can be proven that the unborn child is not a living entity, then its right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be protected.”

— Ronald Reagan

“This country was founded upon the principle that we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - those rights are what make America great, and they belong to each and every one of us.”

— Charles B. Rangel

“Bloodshed, gentlemen, no doubt is lamentable. I have seen some of it
more perhaps than many of those who talk about it with such levity. But there are worse things than bloodshed, even on an extreme scale ... The trampling down of law and order which, under the conditions of a civilised state, assure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
all this would be worse than bloodshed.”

— Winston S. Churchill

“A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on you mind. (It's another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini. It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!”

— Steven Pinker

“People, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side”

— Elizabeth Strout

“America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others.”

— Alex Epstein

“For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.”

— Andrew Bacevich

“[Book's subtitle:] Designed as a beacon of light to guide women to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but which may be read by members of the sterner sect, without injury to themselves or the book.”

— Marietta Holley

“A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.”

— Matthew Woodring Stover

“Anyone who believes in the natural and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is obliged to accept that individuals have the right to buy and sell alcohol. That's why all the regulations that people take for granted-the restrictions on hours of operation, the ban on Sunday sales, the minimum distance from schools and churches, the minimum age, and the protection of local wineries from competition by wineries in other states-are illegitimate.”

— Sheldon Richman

“The recently ended twentieth century was characterized by a level of human rights violations unparalleled in all of human history. In his book Death by Government, Rudolph Rummel estimates some 170 million government-caused deaths in the twentieth century. The historical evidence appears to indicate that, rather than protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of their citizens, governments must be considered the greatest threat to human security.”

— Hans-Hermann Hoppe

“You want to reclaim your country? You got to go back to the first men who started this country, the founding fathers and this is going to be shocking for the liberal professors out there that are indoctrinating our kids but the founding fathers believed in the Judeo-Christian god that believed we have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness! You can pursuit it. If you don't get it, it's your fault! You messed up. Go back to work. Work harder.”

— Brad Stine

“There's not much a newspaper reporter can do about dead men. But a newspaper reporter and a cop and a judge can deliver some justice. That's why the founding fathers wrote it up the way they did, I suppose. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Everyone is entitled to those things.”

— Charlie LeDuff

“Wise statesmen ... established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began ...”

— Abraham Lincoln

“When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.”

— David McCullough

“In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ... America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“All unprejudiced persons objectively surveying the grim events in Bangla Desh since March 25 have recognized the revolt of 75 million people, a people who were forced to the conclusion that neither their life, nor their liberty, to say nothing of the possibility of the pursuit of happiness, was available to them.”

— Indira Gandhi

“When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom by the way were clergymen, they said that we had certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them. I still believe that.”

— Mike Huckabee

“That is our generation's task, to make these works, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.”

— Barack Obama

“Our unalienable right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, those rights were stripped from college kids in Blackburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers at Columbine. And, and from first graders in Newtown, first graders.”

— Barack Obama

“A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The function of our Government is to insure to all its citizens, now and hereafter, their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we of this generation destroy the resources from which our children would otherwise derive their livelihood, we reduce the capacity of our land to support a population, and so either degrade the standard of living or deprive the coming generations of their fight to life on this continent.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“In a composite Nation like ours, made up of almost every variety of the human family, there should be, as before the Law, no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no black, no white, but one country, one citizenship equal rights and a common destiny for all.
A government that cannot or does not protect the humblest citizen in his right to life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness, should be reformed or overthrown, without delay.”

— Frederick Douglass

“The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right ... Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs.”

— Hannah Arendt

“The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens.”

— Dan Savage