Leonard Hobhouse Quotes

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

Who does not see that . . . the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?

The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.

Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.

It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men's property, which they had not before, as individuals.

There exists in modem America the necessity for protecting all of us from arbitrary action by governments more powerful and more pervasive than any in our ancestors’ time.

Government is force.

The liberal, emphasizing the civil and property rights of the individual, insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the state his servant.

The Constitution is not about restricting the people; it is about restricting the government.

There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.

In speaking of natural rights, therefore, it is essential to remember that these alleged rights have no political force whatsoever, unless recognized and enforced by the state.

The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom. That's a personal evaluation, of course.

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.

Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.

The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents.

[J]ust because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right.

As government grows, freedom recedes.

The Bill of Rights isn't about us, it's about them . It isn't a list of things we're permitted to do, it's a list of things they aren't allowed even to consider.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.

The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

The freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

Individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state.