John Locke Quotes
Freedom from absolute, arbitrary power is so necessary to, and closely joined with, a man's preservation, that he cannot part with it but by what forfeits his preservation and life together
John Locke, 1632-1704, English Political Philosopher, Second Treatise on Government, 1690
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Hayward claimed that Wilson was the first American President who ever criticized the American Constitution. Many do not agree as Madison and Jefferson in part, along with most other Americans, found the Constitution so wanting that it was ratified only on condition of the passage of the Bill of Rights. Jackson, was distressed by the limitations on the President and many others had their objections, but Wilson, before he became a politician was a prominent academic political scientist and wrote voluminously and had an intellectual following so his criticism was not considered so “political” as others.
He was considered Massachusetts’ greatest Colonial orator.
In many countries, the king received all land and most property upon the death of a landowner.
See {587703} for a similar statement by a Supreme Court Justice.
Jefferson had deliberately modified John Locke’s phrase “life, liberty and property.
Those who support the right of the individual woman to use contraception or have an abortion cite this quotation to illustrate this early statement of the right of a person to have control over his or her own body.
This was written and adopted by Vermont a decade before the United States Constitution the ideas for which were in existence in America before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
The call for individual liberty and the right of personal property by clergy is surprising to many. This Cahier was the consensus of the Clergy of Blois in 1789. There were cahiers of several provinces of France—some by the clergy, some by the nobles. What is fascinating is the emergence of many of the pre-Revolutionary French concepts. The example of the American revolution and its principles was known throughout the educated classes of France.
The preamble to this declaration of womens’ rights cleverly beginy s with the words of the Declaration of Independence with the single change that “all men” is replaced with “all men and women.” The message was clear. If the founders had a moral right and duty to revolt for these objectives women would be justified and duty bound to make similar efforts. That message terrified many men of the era.
It was drafted by John Adams. 9 Years later the French in their Revolution used the first clause in their Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—See Quotation 602404 For an opposite point of view see Quotation 635927.
This constitution, 13 years later, became the basis for the national Batavian Constitution.
John Locke FRS was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
