John Locke Quotes
-
Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others.
-
The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.
-
Since nothing appears to me to give Children so much becoming Confidence and Behavior, and so raise them to the conversation of those above their Age, as Dancing. I think they should be taught to dance as soon as they are capable of learning it.
-
Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.
-
I pretend not to teach, but to inquire.
-
What humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us.
-
If any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people by his own authority and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government.
-
Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.
-
He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.
-
[Individuals] have a right to defend themselves and recover by force what by unlawful force is taken from them.
-
These two, I say, viz. external material things, as the objects of SENSATION, and the operations of our own minds within, as the objects of REFLECTION, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings.
-
Nature never makes excellent things, for mean or no uses: and it is hardly to be conceived, that our infinitely wise Creator, should make so admirable a Faculty, as the power of Thinking, that Faculty which comes nearest the Excellency of his own incomprehensible Being, to be so idlely and uselesly employ'd, at least 1/4 part of its time here, as to think constantly, without remembering any of those Thoughts, without doing any good to it self or others, or being anyway useful to any other part of Creation.
-
I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.
-
It is easier for a tutor to command than to teach.
-
He that will make good use of any part of his life must allow a large part of it to recreation.
-
Beating is the worst, and therefore the last means to be us'd in the correction of children, and that only in the cases of extremity, after all gently ways have been try'd, and proved unsuccessful; which, if well observ'd, there will very seldom be any need of blows.
-
I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.
-
Where there is no law there is no freedom.
-
The greatest part of mankind ... are given up to labor, and enslaved to the necessity of their mean condition; whose lives are worn out only in the provisions for living.
-
To understand political power aright, and derive from it its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.
-
There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason.
-
Children generally hate to be idle; all the care then is that their busy humour should be constantly employed in something of use to them.
-
The improvement of the understanding is for two ends; first, for our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver and make out that knowledge to others.
-
Our deeds disguise us. People need endless time to try on their deeds, until each knows the proper deeds for him to do. But every day, every hour, rushes by. There is no time.