Aaron > Aaron's Quotes

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.”
― Charles-Louis De Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

“...when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can only come from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost.”
― Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

“The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions.”
― Thomas Hobbes

“To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.”
― Thomas Hobbes

“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry... no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
― Thomas Hobbes

“For such is the nature of man, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance.”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“The condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone”
― Thomas Hobbes

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
― Aristotle

“It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.”
― Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics and Politics

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”
― Aristotle, Politics

“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.”
― Aristotle

“Man is by nature a political animal.”
― Aristotle, Politics

“For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony. But justice is the bond of men in states, and the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.”
― Aristotle, Politics

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
― John Locke

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not common.”
― John Locke

“To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.”
― John Locke

“Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”
― John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

“The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”
― James Madison

“The advancement of science and the diffusion of information [is] the best aliment to true liberty.”
― James Madison

“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
― James Madison

“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.”
― James Madison, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison Volume 3

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both”
― James Madison

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
― James Madison

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
― James Madison, Federalist Papers

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.”
― James Madison

“You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
― James Madison, The Federalist Papers

“Equal laws protecting equal rights…the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country.”
― James Madison

“From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”
― James Madison, Federalist Papers Nos. 10 and 51