Charles Fried > Quotes

“it has always been a premise that compelled belief is not true faith, that man can come to salvation only if he comes freely, and therefore, in the end, that a man is responsible for his own soul. This element, of course, becomes central in Protestant theology, which emphasizes each individual’s personal and unmediated relationship to God. The individual’s capacity and therefore right to judge both truth and goodness was a premise of the Enlightenment.”
― Charles Fried, Modern Liberty: And the Limits of Government

“animal. Our self-reflective perception, our judging and choosing, are what constitute our soul, our consciousness, our conscience (sometimes).”
― Charles Fried, Modern Liberty: And the Limits of Government

“The capacity for judgment, to make plans, to choose one’s good, is what we share with other persons. It is what makes us persons.”
― Charles Fried, Modern Liberty: And the Limits of Government

“Just as this social creation, the state, cannot coherently be limited by reference to rights that are its own invention, and society is fundamentally organized by entities whose reality is society’s own construct, so it is with the value of physical objects and human labor, the division of the sexes and indeed the identity of the individual person, subsisting over time as the distinct and ultimate subject of discourse and attribution.”
― Charles Fried, Modern Liberty: And the Limits of Government

“So too the growth of modern science depended on the premise of the individual’s ability to judge evidence and argument for himself, free from the authority— though not the argument and evidence—of tradition.”
― Charles Fried, Modern Liberty: And the Limits of Government

“we need to mark the difference between what another may offer, threaten, or refuse while respecting my liberty and what offers, threats, and refusals violate it. It is the line between my rights and the rights of another. Marking that line is liberty’s most difficult intellectual task.”
― Charles Fried, Modern Liberty: And the Limits of Government