Category: Thought

A journey of a thousand leagues starts with a single step.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 64, line 12.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Does anybody want to carry out a political schism? He should be able to do so but on one condition, namely, that he will do it within his own group, affecting neither the rights nor the creed of others.

Paul-Emile de Puydt, “Panarchy” (1860).

A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.

Associate Justice George Sutherland, Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233, 251 (1936).

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

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.