Edmund Burke Quotes

I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.

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.

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

A man is free in proportion to the measure of his virtues, and the extent to which he is free determines what his virtues can accomplish.

It cannot be called freedom, a freedom which can choose only the right and not the wrong; then that is not freedom.

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

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 firmly that in making ethical decisions, man has the prerogative of true freedom of choice.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Bur what is Freedom? Rightly understood, A Universal license to be good.

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.

Freedom and slavery, the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice, and both are acts of the will.

The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them.

It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom?

Liberty is equally desirable to the good and to the bad, to the brave and to the dastardly.

Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

You are to do the choosing here and now during this exciting and wonderful time on earth. Moral agency, the freedom to choose, is certainly one of God's greatest gifts next to life itself. We have the honorable right to choose; therefore, we need to choose the right. This is not always easy.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.

What is the freedom of the most free? To do what is right!

Doctrine that eliminates or even obscures the function of choice of values and enlistment of desires and emotions in behalf of those chosen weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action. It thus helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.

Every virtuous man is free.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.