All... natural rights may be abridged or modified in [their] exercise by law.
Interpretation
Natural rights can be restricted by law for the sake of order and society.
This quote by Thomas Jefferson highlights the balance between individual rights and the laws governing society. While individuals possess inherent natural rights, their exercise can be limited or modified by laws to ensure the overall welfare and structure of the community. This reflects the idea that freedoms must sometimes yield to legal frameworks to maintain social order.
In practice
Citing this quote during a legal debate about the limits of personal freedom.
The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.
I, place economy among the first & most important republican virtues, & public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared
βWe must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance.
A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.
The need to leave a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution.
The boundaries of democracy have to be widened so as to include economic equality also. This is the great revolution through which we are all passing.
Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all β¦ is not to have one.
...it is not only the general principles of justice that are infringed, or at least set aside, by the exclusion of women, merely as women, from any share in the representation; that exclusion is also repugnant to the particular principles of the British Constitution. It violates one of the oldest of our constitutional maxims...that taxation and representation should be co-extensive. Do not women pay taxes?
We all have the same God, we just serve him differently. Rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, oceans all have different names, but they all contain water. So do religions have different names, and they all contain truth, expressed in different ways forms and times. It doesn't matter whether you're a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew. When you believe in God, you should believe that all people are part of one family. If you love God, you can't love only some of his children.
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