The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government
If the provisions of the constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.
Associate Justice George Sutherland, Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398, 483 (1934).
Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation.
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed, (London: John Chapman, 1851), Pt. I, Ch. 2 : “The Evanescence of Evil,” from the concluding paragraph.
For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time.
Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland, Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board, 301 U.S. 103, 141 (1937) (dissenting).
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
Reason expresses purpose, purpose expresses impulse, and impulses express a natural body with self-equilibrating powers.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Society (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), p. 138.
Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.
Jeremy Bentham, “On Publicity,” The Works of Jeremy Bentham volume 2, part 2 (1839).
Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed, (London: John Chapman, 1851), Pt. II, Ch. 4 : Derivation of a First Principle, § 3.
Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.
The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.
Herbert Spencer, “On Manners and Fashion,” The Westminster Review (April 1854), as reprinted in Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Vol. III (D. Appleton, 1891).