Leo XIII Quotes

The state is therefore everyone; the rules within the state are laws which safeguard the welfare of all and which must originate from the welfare of all.

Are the welfare and safety of the whole body politic anything else than the welfare and safety of all its individual members?

Every society, all government, and every kind of civil compact therefore, is or ought to be, calculated for the general good and safety of the community.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

I will govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will.

Concern for individual well-being is for private citizens .... Princes, who enjoy public possessions, should be concerned with public good.

The wisdom of the few may be the light of mankind, but the interest of the few is not the profit of mankind, nor of a commonwealth.

A cabinet is a combining committee, a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part of the state. In its origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the other.

A Universal Good should reflect the reality of the individual benefits that are collected under its name, not the other way around.

The highest proof of civility is that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.

Social progress makes the well-being of all more and more the business of each.

There is an indissoluble union between a magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.

The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. ... The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all.

I can remember way back when a liberal was one who was generous with his money.

The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.

Every sort of seven billion human being have to think about the well-being of humanity.

Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common; or, at any rate, they care for it only to the extent to which each is individually concerned.

When the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name - a constitution.

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.

No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.

To each, therefore, must be given his own share of goods, and the distribution of created goods, which, as every discerning person knows, is laboring today under the gravest evils due to the huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered propertyless, must be effectively called back to and brought into conformity with the norms of the common good, that is, social justice.

It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.

What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?

The example of changing a constitution by assembling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the former examples we had give them. The constitution, too, which was the result of our deliberation, is unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men.

The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.