Quote #157: Jefferson on the nature of freedom of religion

Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone[.] 

--  The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786).

Quote #139: Enduring freedom is embodied freedom

"The only freedom which can last is a freedom embodied somewhere, rooted in a history, located in space, sanctioned by a genealogy, and blessed by a religious establishment.  The only equality which abstract rights, insisted upon outside the context of politics, are likely to provide is the equality of universal slavery.  It is a lesson which Western man is only now beginning to learn."

- M.E. Bradford, A Better Guide Than Reason: Federalists & Anti-Federalists (Transaction Publishers: 1994), pg. xviii.

[Cross-posted at my own blog, Ordered Liberty.]

Quote #127: on democracy

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."

- Abraham Lincoln (1808-1865), lawyer, politician, and first Republican president of the United States.

Quote #126: on the sanctity of private property

"So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community."

- Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780), Commentary on the Laws of England.

Quote #125: on fighting for justice

"Power never concedes anything without a demand. It never has and it never will." 


- Frederick Douglass (1808-1895), former slave, African-American civil rights activist, abolitionist and American political philosopher.

Unalienable Rights

"The whole of that Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... [It] establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of."

- Albert Gallatin, letter to Alexander Addison, 1789