David Hartley Coleridge Quotes

True liberty, then, is a liberty to do everything that is right …

Liberty is the essential precondition for achieving virtue... In order to exercise virtue, we need to have the ability to choose freely.

The will is truly free, when it is not the slave of vices and sins.

When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Without freedom there can be no morality.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.

Democracy may have arisen in the West as the way of striving for the universal aspiration to dignity and freedom, but it isn't alien to the underlying concepts that infuse religion and moral philosophy everywhere.

True independence and freedom can only exist in doing what's right.

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience. It grows as conscience grows. The domains of both grow together. Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being Free Will.

I believe in the freedom of choice in both life and death.

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Moral liberty is the power of following, in all circumstances, our sense of right and wrong, or of acting in conformity to our reflecting and moral principles, without being controlled by any contrary principles.

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.

Morality depends on individual freedom, and it requires some sense to know where to draw the line.

A liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest.

There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.