The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves. | Where there is no law there is no freedom. | Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered. | Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other. | Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and
made by the legislative power vested in it and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man. | [Individuals] have a right to defend themselves and recover by force what by unlawful force is taken from them. | [H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any
other age, to be convinced to the contrary. | 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. | [E]very Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property. | And because it may be too great a temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons, who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they may exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both in its making, and execution, to their own private advantage, and thereby come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community, contrary to the end of society and government: therefore in wellordered commonwealths, where the good of the whole is so considered, as it ought, the legislative power is put into the hands of divers persons, who duly assembled, have by themselves, or jointly with others, a power to make laws, which when they have done, being separated again, they are themselves subject to the laws they have made; which is a new and near tie upon them, to take care, that they make them for the public good. | New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. | Government has no other end than the preservation of property. | The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves. |
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