Herbert Spencer Quotes

There is only one basic human right: the right to do as you please, without causing others harm. With it comes our only basic human duty: the duty to accept the consequences of our actions.

The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other

A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value.

Just as man must have liberty to think and speak, so he must have liberty in food, dress, and marriage, and in every other thing, so long as he does not injure others.

I believe in trying to get a balance between individual freedom on the one hand and social responsibility on the other.

I believe everybody got the right to live their own life the way they want to.

This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

The real or supposed rights of man are of two kinds, active and passive; the right in certain cases to do as we list; and the right we possess to the forbearance or assistance of other men. The first of these a just philosophy will probably induce us universally to explode.

Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong and demonstrably more destructive for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

We’re not so free that we don’t have to listen to rules, and laws, and regulations. Those are important. But the spirit, the freedom of the spirit, that’s what I think of American Dream, that we are free here to do what we want to do, what we set out to do.

In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect.

The freedom of Mankind does not lie in the fact that can do what we want, but that we do not have to do that which we do not want.

Every person's life is theirs by right. An individual's life can and must belong only to to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave.

Void of freedom, what would virtue be?

The loss of free will I find unacceptable - what most of us refer to as rights.

The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other; for envy creates the beginning of strife.

At this time is freedom anything but the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

Libertarians argue that no normal adult has the right to impose choices on other normal adults, except in abnormal circumstances, such as when one person finds another unconscious and administers medical assistance or calls an ambulance.

I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.

The absolute rights of individuals may be resolved into the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right to enjoy and acquire property

No one has a right to obstruct another exercising his faculties innocently for the relief of sensibilities made a part of his nature.