Harry V. Jaffa - Human Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

View all Harry V. Jaffa Quotes
Unless we as a political community can by reasoned discourse re-establish in our own minds the authority of the constitutionalism of the Founding Fathers and of Lincoln, of government devoted to securing the God-given equal rights of every individual human being, we will remain ill equipped to bring the fruits of freedom to others.

Harry V. Jaffa
By the principles of the Declaration of Independence, majority rule in a free society is not an end in itself, nor is it a source of the purposes served by free government. Majority rule exists to secure the rights with which all human persons are "endowed by their Creator." The recognition of the origin of these rights, in God and nature, comes before any action of any majority. Only as we all recognize that "the just powers of government" exist to secure the equal rights possessed by every human being, whether in the majority or minority, can tyranny be prevented.

Harry V. Jaffa
"This nation was founded," President Bush wrote, "upon the belief that every human being is endowed by our Creator with certain 'unalienable rights.'" The President, in using the exact language of the Declaration of Independence, including the archaic "unalienable," has expressed the conviction that "the laws of nature and of nature's God" furnish the moral foundation of constitutional government. "President Jefferson's timeless principle," he wrote, "obligates us to pursue a civil society that will democratically embrace its essential moral duties..."

Harry V. Jaffa
And the war was a terrible war, but it was a war for human freedom, and if the South had succeeded and if slavery had been extended, the United States, or part of it, might very well have been on the side of Hitler in the Second World War. We would not have been the bastion of freedom we have been in the twentieth century.

Harry V. Jaffa
It is impossible for men who exercise their reason to believe that any one part of the human race has been marked out by God or nature as so superior to any other. No man is by nature, or by manifest declaration of God's will, the possessor or possession, the master or slave, of another. Whoever asserts such a right to such domination or possession is, in Congress's words from that same document, 'rightfully resistible'.

Harry V. Jaffa
The peaceful and orderly inauguration of George W. Bush, as 43rd President of the United States, after the closest election in American history, is an event deserving thoughtful and thankful reflection. There were present on the inaugural platform former presidents of both parties, as well as the gracious loser in the contest just ended. They were testimony to the prizing above all political differences, of the rule of law under the Constitution. We are accustomed, now, to resolving our differences with ballots and not bullets. We are accustomed, now, when we lose an election to look to the next election to advance our political fortunes. But few of us today are aware of how recent in human experience, and how fragile, is this phenomenon.

Harry V. Jaffa
In the tradition of American constitutionalism, all men are equally endowed by their Creator with certain rights. The equality of man is understood in the light of man's inequality with God: because men are not and never can become God or gods — because unqualified wisdom is never available to human beings — only government by the consent of the governed, and under the rule of law, is intrinsically in accordance with the eternal order.

Harry V. Jaffa
While slavery meant Egypt, and slavemasters meant Pharoah, America itself remained the promised land. The slaves knew that it was not in Africa, Europe, or anywhere else that a nation had been founded upon the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. It was their destiny to cross over jordan here, and to make their decisive contribution to the human story here, by partaking of that new birth of freedom that alone could vindicate the cause of all human beings everywhere.

Harry V. Jaffa
No, on the contrary, the Constitution exists to protect that right. The important point is that the Constitution exists to protect individual liberty and individual property. In fact, the most important of all of the rights, really the foundation of all rights, are the rights to private property. But the right to private property is a right for each individual human being to own himself.

Harry V. Jaffa
If "safeguards of individual liberty" do not have "any intrinsic worth," then neither does individual liberty. And if individual liberty has no intrinsic worth, neither does individual life. It is impossible to imagine a more complete denial of President Bush's proclamation of the sanctity of human life, or of his assertion of an "essential human dignity attached to all persons by virtue of their very existence." This is not only legal positivism, it is nihilism. It is not only a denial of any moral foundation of constitutionalism, it is a denial of any moral foundation of political community.

Harry V. Jaffa
George W. Bush has said he wants to change things in Washington. On this President's Day, we find him attempting this change in a most profound way. President Bush is to be commended for his recent Proclamation of National Sanctity of Human Life Day, in which he reminds his fellow citizens of the true principles of free government. But those principles today are usually ignored, or scorned. By taking up the challenge of defending these principles, President Bush aligns himself with the greatest President of our nation's history.

Harry V. Jaffa
That all men are created equal does not mean that human beings are the same, or equal, in size, strength, beauty, virtue, or intelligence. There are obviously great differences in individual aptitudes and talents in sports, music, mathematics, speaking, and writing. They are also unequal in the virtues, among them courage, temperance, and justice. But as Jefferson once said, the fact that Sir Isaac Newton may be the most intelligent of living human beings does not give him any right whatever to my person or my property.

Harry V. Jaffa
No result of the Civil War was more fundamental than the authoritative assertion of the inclusion of human beings of any color and any ethnicity in the proposition of human equality. A consensus in favor of the colorblind Constitution is provided by the logic of reality and the logic of history.

Harry V. Jaffa
That the equality of human souls in the sight of God ought to be translated into a political structure of equal political rights has come to be regarded as the most authentic interpretation of the Gospel itself. Slavery, and the imposition of all arbitrary forms of inequality of man by man, has come to be seen as demeaning to the souls of God's creation.

Harry V. Jaffa
The subculture of American Negroes is perhaps the most deeply rooted of all American subcultures, since most black Americans are descended from ancestors who were on the North American continent long before those of the great majority of white Americans. And the blood of many of them is, in truth, mingled with that of the great white families of the colonial and Revolutionary periods. The achievements of this subculture, both in slavery and in freedom, are among the most exalted in human record. It is doubted whether any expression of the human spirit transcends the Negro spiritual.

Harry V. Jaffa
The vice-president and the president of the Confederate States of America grounded their justification of American slavery on the grounds of a fraudulent science and a crazy fundamentalism. No sane person today can regard them as other than pathetic reminders of a society, like Nazi Germany, mentally unbalanced by its commitment to human inequality.

Harry V. Jaffa