Nations grow corrupt, love bondage more than liberty; bondage with ease than strenuous liberty. |
No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free. |
None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. |
The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty. |
There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution. |
When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for. |
None can love freedom but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope than under tyrants. |
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. |
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them; they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. |
License they mean when they cry, Liberty!
For who loves that, must first be wise and good. |
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. |
The conquer'd, also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose. |
For what can war but endless war still breed? |
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. |
