Private Judgment Quotes

Roger Williams... successfully vindicated the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, and effected a moral and political revolution in all governments of the civilized world.

The right of conscience and private judgment is unalienable, and it is truly the interest of all mankind to unite themselves into one body for the liberty, free exercise, and unmolested enjoyment of this right.

We hear in these days a great deal respecting rights--the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, the rights of property, and the rights of man. Rights are grand things, divine things in this world of God's; but the way in which we expound these rights, alas! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I can see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas! alas! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous, divine world than his own rights.

If all Church power vests in the clergy, then the people are practically bound to passive obedience in all matters of faith and practice; for all right of private judgment is then denied.

The right of private judgment is absolute in every American citizen.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.

Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.

[I]t is impossible for those, who believe in the truth of Christianity, as a divine revelation, to doubt, that it is the especial duty of government to foster, and encourage it among all the citizens and subjects. This is a point wholly distinct from that of the right of private judgment in matters of religion, and of the freedom of public worship according to the dictates of one's conscience.

That business does not prosper which you transact with the eyes of others.

Your opinion is not influenced by anyone when you're alone at a matinee. It's just you and the movie.

Freedom of thought and the right to private judgment, in matters of conscience, driven from every corner of the earth, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. Let us cherish the noble guests, and shelter them under the wings of universal toleration.

Religion is now a matter of private judgment and observance for a majority, and thus we have become a country of not a few hundred different creeds but a few million.

All violation of established practice implies in its own nature a rejection of the common opinion, a defiance of common censure, and an appeal from general laws to private judgment: he, therefore, who differs form others without apparent advantage, ought not to be angry if his arrogance is punished with ridicule; if those whose example he superciliously overlooks, point him out to derision, and hoot him back again into the common road.

the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.

Individual liberty and responsibility involve the right of private judgment; this involves the right to all the light necessary to form a correct judgment.

When men have appreciated the countless differences which the exercise of that judgment must necessarily produce, when they have estimated the intrinsic fallibility of their reason, and the degree in which it is distorted by the will, when, above all, they have acquired that love of truth which a constant appeal to private judgment at last produces, they will never dream that guilt can be associated with an honest conclusion, or that one class of arguments should be stifled by authority.