Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.

I don't much care whether rural Anatolians or Istanbul secularists take power. I'm not close to any of them. What I care about is respect for the individual.

All I'm for is the liberty of the individual.

All government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual. And that is the essential meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The individual is greater than the state.

Where after all do universal human rights begin? In small places, closes to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

… it [liberty] denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home, bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of one's own conscience and generally, to enjoy those privileges long recognized in common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.

I stand for all those who feel that the government no longer understands the individual and no longer respects individual rights.

Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.

It's a principle of my philosophy that you have to respect the individual human being.

If consumers are strong, if consumers are protected, if they can trust the marketplace and feel confident that they're not being cheated here and there, then consumers can drive this economy forward.

We marked a milestone for consumer empowerment when we began to publish consumer complaint narratives which allow people to share in their own words their experiences in the consumer financial marketplace.

The question is how do you do it [more consumer protection] so that it actually works that way? And that takes analysis, and sometimes collaboration between government and business, to understand how that works.

Democracy is such a framework that everyone has the right to live their lives, fix their goals, their aims, their dreams and the ways to achieve them according to their own choice.

I don't know how to run your life. I don't know how to run your life. I don't have the authority to run your life. And the Constitution doesn't permit me to run your life.

This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one's happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature. It's only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen - that is what makes the crucial difference.

It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded.

The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul--our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment--our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.

Liberty cannot be sacrificed for the sake of anything.

Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

Individualism regards man-every man-as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.