Passages about liberty and rights

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.

And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The first man who enclosed a piece of ground and took it into his head to say, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Man is naturally good, and it is our institutions alone that have made him bad.

These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.

Solon tells Croesus that no one can be called happy while he still lives, since a god can throw down the most fortunate man at the end, and only a finished life can be judged.

The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Among the new objects that drew my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of conditions.

A power rises above the citizens, absolute, detailed, regular, provident and mild. It would be like a father's authority if, like that, its object were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks instead to keep them permanently in childhood.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of communism.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.

Socrates says that they should follow not the opinion of the many about what is just but the opinion of the one who understands it, as a man in training listens to his trainer rather than to the crowd.

Man is by nature a political animal.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!

Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body; which means nothing other than that he will be forced to be free.

We hold 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.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

They make a desert and call it peace.

The histories of Tiberius and Caligula, of Claudius and Nero, were falsified through cowardice while they flourished, and composed, when they fell, under the influence of still rankling hatreds.

In every republic there are two different inclinations, that of the people and that of the great men, and all the laws that are made in favour of liberty are born of the disunion between them.

For as good customs have need of laws to maintain them, so laws have need of good customs in order to be observed.

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

One thing, and only one thing, is necessary for Christian life, righteousness, and freedom. That one thing is the most holy Word of God.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.

Humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself but in relation to himself.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM.

Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see.

Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us to the point where we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

Heresy is a spiritual matter which no iron can strike, no fire burn, no water drown.

The soul is not under the authority of Caesar; he can neither teach nor guide it, neither kill it nor give it life, neither bind it nor loose it.

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.

The history of the world is nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child.

Millions of women have done so.

Behold what I, a god, suffer at the hands of gods.

In one short word, learn the whole of it: every art that mortals have comes from Prometheus.

All their life was spent not by laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. Their rule was this one clause: Do what you will.

I would rather have you learn nothing than learn such books under such masters, for their learning is but stupidity and their wisdom a sham, bastardising good and noble minds and spoiling the flower of youth.

The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.

Nobody, therefore, in fine, neither single persons nor churches, nay, nor even commonwealths, have any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon pretence of religion.

Go into the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of every nation assembled for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohammedan and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt.

If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two they would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.

Political liberty is not the power of doing what we please. Liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will.

Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.

The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare.

Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.

Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.

Society is indeed a contract, but it is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

I have observed that the philosophers, in order to insinuate their polluted atheism into young minds, systematically flatter all their passions.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.

If you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.

We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.

Tacitus describes the Germans in general, their land, warfare, kings and assemblies, religion, marriage customs and love of drinking and gambling, in the essay's first half.

The essay surveys the individual tribes from the Rhine to the Baltic in its second half, naming and locating peoples whose own accounts of themselves do not survive.

To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation calls on lay rulers to reform a church Rome will not reform, and argues that every baptised Christian is a priest, demolishing the institutional walls that had protected papal authority from lay political intervention.

The Babylonian Captivity of the Church reduces the seven sacraments to two or three and attacks the mass understood as a sacrifice offered by priests, a technical theological argument written in Latin specifically for an audience of fellow theologians rather than general readers.

Drafted by the furrier Sebastian Lotzer with the preacher Christoph Schappeler, the manifesto demands the right of each community to choose its pastor, the abolition of serfdom and the small tithe, and free access to game, fish and forest.

Every article is justified from Scripture, with an offer to withdraw any shown to be against God's Word, grounding economic and social grievance in specifically religious authority rather than leaving demands as purely secular political claim.

The Indians were the true owners of their lands and goods before the Spaniards came, in public and in private, and neither their unbelief nor their sins nor any supposed want of reason deprived them of dominion.

Neither the emperor nor the pope is lord of the whole world, discovery gives no title to lands already possessed, and refusal of the faith or the sins of the natives are no just cause of war.

Forty-one of the men aboard the Mayflower, anchored off Cape Cod outside the territory of their Virginia patent, signed a single paragraph on 11 November 1620, covenanting together to address the legal uncertainty their unexpected landing location had created.

The settlers, Separatists and others together, covenanted in the presence of God and one another to combine into a civil body politic and to enact and obey just and equal laws for the general good of the colony, establishing government by consent among the actual governed.

Spinoza argues that freedom of thought is compatible with piety and necessary to a stable state, directly challenging the assumption that religious orthodoxy requires suppressing dissenting intellectual inquiry rather than actually depending on permitting it.

Spinoza concludes that the Bible is a historical document written for a particular people in a particular idiom, that it teaches obedience and justice rather than metaphysics, and that miracles cannot suspend the order of nature.

Two Persian noblemen, Usbek and Rica, travel to Paris in 1712 and describe French customs, religion, politics and fashions to friends at home with the puzzled candour of outsiders, mocking the Pope, the king, the financier John Law and the Academy.

Interleaved among the Parisian letters are letters from Usbek's harem in Isfahan, where his prolonged absence loosens the eunuchs' control over his wives, and the wives themselves begin to rebel against the domestic order Usbek left in place.

Fanaticism is to superstition what delirium is to fever and rage to anger, and the man who has ecstasies and visions and takes his dreams for realities is an enthusiast; the man who supports his madness with murder is a fanatic.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly, that is the first law of nature.

Asked as a young man to write a bill of sale for a slave, Woolman wrote it but told his employer that he believed slavekeeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion, and afterward refused to write any instrument that conveyed a human being.

Travelling among Friends in Maryland, Virginia and Carolina, Woolman stayed in slaveholding households, spoke with the masters one by one about the burden on their consciences, and left money for the enslaved who had served him.

Is there for honest poverty / That hings his head, an' a' that? / The coward slave, we pass him by, / We dare be poor for a' that!

The rank is but the guinea's stamp, / The man's the gowd for a' that.

William of Orange warns Egmont repeatedly that the Duke of Alba's arrival in Brussels signals real, immediate danger, and urges him to flee while he still can, but Egmont, trusting in his own popularity and his personal standing with the king, dismisses the warning and remains.

Klärchen, Egmont's lover, attempts to rouse the citizens of Brussels to rise in his defense once he has been arrested, and when the crowd fails to act, overwhelmed by fear of Alba's forces, she despairs entirely and takes poison rather than continue living without him.

Wollstonecraft accuses Burke of sentimental theatricality, of feeling for the queen of France and the pageantry of the old order while the sufferings of the poor, the pressed sailor and the game-law victim, leave him unmoved.

Against Burke's defence of property and hereditary privilege in the name of tradition she sets natural rights grounded in reason and God, arguing that the age of a custom is no argument for it.

Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights, de Gouges declares in her opening article, directly echoing and rewriting the 1789 Declaration's own opening statement about the rights of man.

Woman has the right to mount the scaffold, de Gouges writes; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum, provided her demonstrations do not disturb public order as established by law.

Thomas Paine, in Le Républicain and the Moniteur, argued that the king's flight had abolished the monarchy and that France should become a republic, treating Louis XVI's own attempted abandonment of his post as forfeiting the office's legitimacy.

The Abbé Sieyès replied that he preferred monarchy, understood as government by a single responsible executive, to the republic's committee of executives, and that either could be representative, separating representation from the number of executives.

Condorcet asks by what right men, half of humanity, have excluded women, the other half, from participation in framing the laws they are equally bound to obey, and finds no rational or just answer that would not equally justify excluding some men from the same rights.

He argues that the abolition of slavery is not a matter of gradual accommodation to be delayed for practical convenience, but an immediate demand of justice that admits no legitimate exception or postponement.

Schiller argues that political freedom cannot be achieved by people who are inwardly divided, and that modern specialisation has split the human being into a sense drive and a form drive, a psychological diagnosis with direct political consequences.

Only beauty, through the play drive, can reconcile the sense drive and the form drive, Schiller argues, giving aesthetic experience unusually consequential stakes as the necessary psychological precondition for any genuinely free political order.

Washington announces that he will not be a candidate for a third term, and urges the union of the states above every sectional loyalty, since the name of American belongs to them all in common.

He warns against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, which serves to distract the public councils, agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies, and open the door to foreign influence and corruption.

Kant argues that a rightful condition among people requires an actual civil state possessing genuine coercive authority, since without such authority individuals remain in a condition where their external freedom is never adequately secured against others' arbitrary interference.

Kant defends the death penalty as a strict requirement of retributive justice rather than merely a permissible policy choice among available punishments, a conclusion that has struck many subsequent readers as surprisingly severe given Kant's broader emphasis on human dignity elsewhere in his moral philosophy.

The constitution declares that there can be no slaves in the territory, that servitude is forever abolished, and that all men, regardless of color, are born, live and die free and French, entitled to equal legal standing before the law throughout the colony.

The document simultaneously establishes that agricultural laborers remain bound to their plantations under a regime resembling compulsory work, each cultivator required to continue working the land under close supervision, a provision explicitly designed to preserve the colony's sugar economy despite the formal end of slavery.

In Marbury v. Madison of 1803, Chief Justice Marshall holds that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void and that it is for the courts to say so, while declining the jurisdiction Congress had tried to give the Court.

Justice Gibson's dissent in Eakin v. Raub, a Pennsylvania case of 1825, argues the other side, that the legislature answers to the people rather than to judges, preserving the genuine counterargument against judicial review with unusual clarity.

The declaration renounces France forever, swearing that the new nation will never again submit to French governance, and recalls in unsparing detail the specific cruelties both of slavery under colonial rule and of the recent war fought to end it.

Dessalines and the assembled generals swear to die rather than ever again live under French domination, a collective oath binding the nation's new leadership to permanent, unconditional resistance against any future attempt at French reconquest.

Under the tyranny of the Habsburg governor Gessler, the men of three forest cantons swear an oath of resistance on the Rütli meadow, giving collective political rebellion a specific founding ritual moment distinct from any individual act of defiance.

The hunter Tell, who has kept apart from politics, refuses to bow to Gessler's hat on a pole, is forced to shoot an apple from his son's head, staging tyranny's cruelty in unforgettably concrete and personal form beyond abstract political grievance.

The constitution declares slavery abolished forever throughout Haitian territory, and establishes that all Haitians, whatever their actual skin color, shall be known officially and collectively as black, redefining national identity around shared liberation rather than any inherited racial category.

The document forbids any white man from owning property within Haiti, a direct constitutional response to the plantation economy slavery had required, intended to prevent the return of the colonial economic and racial order the revolution had just overthrown.

My hair is grey, but not with years, / Nor grew it white / In a single night, / As men's have grown from sudden fears.

I had a brother, who to me was more than father, mother, brother, all, and I had a sister who was more than any of the rest.

I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one.

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, / 'Tis woman's whole existence.

A typical selection includes Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and the Immortality Ode, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, Byron, Shelley's Mont Blanc and Ode to the West Wind, and Keats's odes.

Common threads across the selection are nature, the imagination, childhood, revolution and the poet's own mind, themes recurring across genuinely distinct individual voices spanning roughly the generation between the French Revolution and the Reform Act.

Walker argues that American slavery is the cruellest in history, worse than that of the Egyptians, the Romans or the Spanish, because those masters never denied that their slaves were human beings.

He names enforced ignorance, a corrupted Christianity that preaches obedience, and the colonisation scheme to remove free Blacks to Africa as the three supports of slavery, and attacks each in turn.

Mazzini takes Byron and Goethe as the twin summits of the age just ended, Byron the poet of the individual, of subjective will and rebellion, and Goethe the poet of objective contemplation and serene detachment, representing between them the full range of Romantic individualist achievement.

Mazzini argues that each poet is genuinely incomplete, that Byron's subjective rebellion and Goethe's objective detachment each capture only half of what poetry should actually accomplish, brilliant but partial achievements rather than fully realized artistic completeness.

Tocqueville takes French domination as settled and asks how it can be made to last, examining the country's tribes and towns, the Arab and Kabyle populations, and the conduct of the war against Abd al-Qadir.

He argues for European settlement and for giving the colonists civil liberties, and criticises the brutality and lawlessness of French military rule as damaging to France itself.

Thoreau argues that the best government is the one that governs least, and that a person's first obligation is to do what he thinks right rather than what the majority decides.

When a government commits injustice a citizen should withdraw his support from it, even at the cost of prison, since under such a government the true place for a just man is a jail.

She answered ministers who claimed women were too weak for rights by pointing to her own labour in the fields, ploughing and reaping as much as any man, and to the children she had borne and seen sold away.

She argued from scripture that Christ came from God and a woman, and that man had nothing to do with him, turning the ministers' own book against their claim.

Douglass tells his audience that the Fourth of July is theirs, not his, and asks what, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July, answering that it is a day that reveals to him, more than any other day of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

He states plainly that he will not argue that slavery is wrong, since the point needs no argument, and that to do so would be to make himself ridiculous and to insult his audience's understanding by proving what nobody with genuine moral sense actually doubts.

Taking the standing of woman as citizen, as wife, as widow and as mother in turn, Stanton shows that women are taxed and tried without representation, and that on marriage a wife loses her property, her earnings, her name and the custody of her children.

She argues from the Declaration of Independence and the common law and demands the vote and legal equality, grounding her demand in both America's own founding revolutionary principles and in the accumulated technical legal tradition.

The long opening chapter, Economy, itemises the cost of the house and of his food and argues that most people work far more than they need to, spending their lives on what he calls the necessaries and then on luxuries that only hinder them.

Thoreau went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived.

I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you; I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

A child asks what the grass is, and the poet answers that it is the flag of his disposition, the handkerchief of the Lord, the uncut hair of graves, and that the smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

Tocqueville argues that the French Revolution completed work the monarchy had already begun: centralisation, the destruction of local liberty, the separation of classes and the growing equality of Frenchmen under a single administration were all in place before 1789.

The nobility had been reduced to a caste with privileges but no function, and it was precisely when its privileges ceased to buy the peasants any service that they became intolerable.

William Dorrit, presiding over the Marshalsea's debtors as its unofficial Father for so many years that he has ceased fully to register his own imprisonment as confinement, receives the prison's customary tributes and courtesies with a threadbare, entirely sincere dignity that the novel presents as genuinely tragic rather than merely absurd.

News of an unexpected inheritance arrives and frees the Dorrit family from the Marshalsea after decades of confinement, and the novel makes clear almost immediately that the money, far from healing the family, simply relocates William Dorrit's prison-formed vanity and denial into a wealthier, more socially visible setting.