Personal freedom

“ The freedom of man is, in political liberalism, freedom from persons, from personal dominion, from the master; the securing of each individual person against other persons, personal freedom. ”

“ The freedom to others must be as large and complete as the freedom I demand for myself, for, wherein I limit, even in my most secret mind and heart, the freedom of my neighbor, I am giving to him the right to limit me. ”

“ The essential condition of good argument is freedom from personal feeling, with the desire only for the truth,—whether it comes from one party or the other.
Hurry, worry, and irritability all come from selfish resistance to the facts of life, and the only permanent cure for the waste of force and the exhausting distress which they entail, is a willingness to accept those facts, whatever they may be, in a spirit of cheerful and reverent obedience to law. ”

“ In the ultimate resort, the human heart-strong because pure, happy because temperate, attractive because self-denying — is the spring of all law or custom approved of man; and the essence of righteousness is in the freedom and the directness of personal conviction. ”

“ He will surely need in his sincere attitude to life a freedom of mind that is not a name merely but a positive virtue that demands of him more than denunciation of obscurantism, the recognition of a personal duty and the justification of personal works. ”

“ Let us further remember how important it is that every man and woman should insist on the rights of Personality to preserve sacred his or her most intimate sense of selfness and duty the very, essence of Freedom. ”

“ Are we prepared to surrender the approval of our conscience, the new-won self-respect which rewards the successful resistance offered to temptation, as having no basis in fact? And if we are not, what is this but to affirm our freedom and our responsibility alike in doing and forbearing? ”

“ He sees instincts are better and stronger than so-called ‘principles.’ He sees in the hour of need what are called ‘rights’ laughed at, ‘freedom,’ the liberty to do what one pleases, trampled on, the claims of the individual trodden under foot, and theories burst like cobwebs. ”

“ Can men govern themselves? The affirmative is civilization—the negative is barbarism. The whole trend of modern life—the sweep of modern progress—is towards individual freedom and individual responsibility. ”

“ It is so good for you to have freedom of choice; it forms your character—your individuality! If you take the wrong cup or the wrong berry, you will die before the day is over, but you will have acquired the dignity of a Free child? ”

“ They have not yet grasped the elementary fact that the rights of the individual are the rights of all individuals, and that Individualism itself calls for a limitation of the freedom of the individual. ”

“ An innate sense of duty, that guide she never failed to observe, already hedged her steps, protecting her strong, eager spirit from flights of ‘unchartered freedom,’ leading it through restraint and self-denial towards a glorious liberty. ”

“ Remember that while others have given us freedom, we must work and struggle and wait for liberty—that liberty which gives as well as receives, self-supporting, self-protecting, holding the present and looking to the future with confidence. ”

“ What will they think, who expect to hear from our shores the divine message that man is capable of governing himself, and, being free, capable of respecting the freedom of others? To them another spark of light extinguished, another ray of hope obscured, another bond of sympathy severed. ”

“ In the case of difficult circumstances,—if we cease to resist,—if we accept the facts of life,—if we are willing to be poor, or ill, or disappointed, or to live with people we do not like,—we gain a quietness of nerve and a freedom of mind which clears off the mists around us, so that our eyes may see and recognize the gate of opportunity,—open before us. ”

“ Freedom to think my own thoughts, preach my own creeds, do my own work, and make the sacrifices of my own choosing. I declare that I will have no master and no mistress, no slave and no neophyte, but that I will strive to preserve my own personality and to help all of my brothers and sisters, the world over, to preserve theirs. ”

“ This is the fact which bears us out in attributing our reason and all our actions to ourselves. By means of it we absolutely create for ourselves a personality to which we justly refer, and for which we lawfully claim, all our faculties, and all our doings. It is upon this fact, and not upon the fact of his reason, that civilized man has built himself up to be all that we now know, and behold him to be. Freedom, law, morality, and religion have all their origin in this fact. In a word, it is in virtue of it that we are free, moral, social, and responsible beings. ”

“ When you came hither, you found yourselves in possession of a new freedom. You can overeat yourselves, for example; you can overdrink; you can take no care for sleep; you can take no exercise or too much; you can do little work or too much; you can indulge in harmful amusements: in short, you have a great new freedom here. Is it a good thing for you or a bad thing? Clearly you can go astray, for the road is not fenced. You can make mistakes; you can fall into sin. Have you learned to control yourselves? Have you got the will-power in you to regulate your own conduct? ”

“ And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naïve, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. ”

“ Where there is conscious freedom, not only to act as he wills, but to will obedience to the dictates of conscience, character is possible. The freedom spoken of, and without which there can be no obligation or responsibility, is, of course, human freedom. ”

“ We must commence, then, by liberating our ordinary consciousness from the control or domineering action of outward objects. Thus commencing at the very circumference of man, we shall clear out an enlarged atmosphere of freedom around that true and sacred centre of his personality—his character, namely, as a moral and accountable agent. ”

“ He maintains that the reality of a power or liberty, to will what we will, is testified to us indirectly, if not directly, by the experience of our own consciousness, and that the possession of it is essential to all activity of which the modes are properly objects of praise or blame. Such freedom is the root of man’s personality, and constitutes his power of self-control over the desires and affections that have been inserted in his mind and committed to his government. ”

“ It is choice which makes the dignity of human nature. It is habitual choosing after examination, consideration, reflection, and advice, which makes the man of power. It is through the internal motive power of the will that men imagine, invent, and thrust thoughts out into the obscure beyond, into the future. The will is the prime motive power; and you can only train your wills, in freedom. That is what freedom is for, in school and college, in society, industries, and governments. Fine human character is the ultimate object, and freedom is the indispensable condition of its development. ”

“ That impatience of control, and jealousy and obstinate perseverance in maintaining the rights of personal liberty and independence, which so strongly mark the human character in all the stages of life, must be managed with great caution and address, by those who are desirous of doing good;—or, indeed, of doing any thing effectually with mankind. ”

“ For the freedom of man—his power of self-rule, direct by his simple will, or mediate through outward helps of circumstance and condition—enlarges like his property and other power, from age to age; and the quantity of human virtue is ever on the increase. ”

“ A new sense of freedom and joy is pervading the hearts of the people as their individual faculties are awakened, and they discover, in a social life which permits alike of the completest concerted action and of [142] the fullest individual liberty, the long-sought-for means of reconciliation between order and freedom—between the well-being of the individual and of society. ”

“ It is true, that both rectitude and duty, together with liberty, are resolvable into the essential good. Or, in other words, freedom, rectitude, and duty are the modes of thought in which we conceive of the good as existing in the soul of man, and that they are, each of them, in their distinct nature and harmonious union, the true ideal of the good—the modes of thought, also, in which the intuition of man perceives the good in the case of every moral action which is good. ”

“ You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action. ”

“ The hope of becoming more and more rational, of making ourselves more and more independent of external things, nay, of ourselves, we could not give up. The word freedom sounds so beautiful, that we cannot do without it, even though it designates an error. ”

“ I looked forward, through the present age of loud disputes but generally weak convictions, to a future which shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual action in all modes not hurtful to others ”

“ The kind of society which encourages creative self-expression, independent judgment and a living expanding fellowship must necessarily be conceived and created in freedom. For to these essential human impulses, freedom is the very breath of life. ”

“ The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. ”

“ In this welcome which you give to me, the humble and all too unworthy representative of a magnificent cause, the great principle of human freedom is at length recognised, that freedom inherited at birth, and only wrung from individuals by oppression and wrong. ”

“ I content myself now with claiming for the developed, rational human self a measure of freedom to the extent which I have just defined—that it is the real cause of its own actions. It is capable of self-determination. ”

“ With all these, the greatest possible latitude in regard to morals, and all the liberty we desire. Now, if society gives us all these, and you must admit that it does, has it not done its entire duty? ”

“ I feel now that I had been led to expect a greater measure of freedom from the troubles which fall on the people, in the midst of which I find myself, than the dispensation under which I live warranted ”

“ So, to reduce our moral judgments, confusion and all, to small compass, we are free, others are not; they are free, we are not; and our freedom is bound by duty, by duty to the moral law, while their freedom, unless a hopeless lawlessness, is bound by the environment and its law. Again, good and evil are each unmixed, and moral acts serve two masters—that is to say, spring from two sources. ”

“ For want of clearly comprehending his own peculiar nature, his proper course, his wants, and his rights, man has fallen in society, from FREEDOM into SLAVERY. He had forgotten the purpose of his existence, or else he believed himself obliged to suppress the natural desires of his heart, to sacrifice his welfare to the caprice of chiefs, either elected by himself, or submitted to without examination. ”

“ There is no event on which our felicity and usefulness more materially depends, and with regard to which, therefore, the freedom of choice and the exercise of our own understanding ought to be less infringed ”

“ Thus the appearance in slaves of the conception that they should be masters of themselves, does not conflict with the proposition that only so far as a certain freedom of action and acquisition is secured to a body of men through their recognition of the exercise of that freedom by each other as being for the common good, is there an actualisation of the individual's consciousness of having life and ends of his own. ”

“ That this freedom is limited in a variety of ways, by his material environment, by the clashing of impulses within himself, by the conflict of his desires with the will of the social organism in which he finds his place, is sufficiently palpable. ”

“ Temperance walks hand in hand with freedom. To remove a chain from the body puts an additional responsibility upon the soul. Liberty says to the man: You injure or benefit yourself; you increase or decrease your own well-being. It is a question of intelligence. You need not bow to a supposed tyrant, or to infinite goodness. You are responsible to yourself and to those you injure, and to none other. ”

“ Man thinks, feels, and acts, his activity works itself out in himself, — thus he realizes his freedom. As a member of society, on the other hand, his thoughts, feelings, and acts are returned to him by other men, neither increased nor diminished, — this is justice. ”

“ the spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom--they are the pillars of society. ”

“ Now, it is clear that the very absence of any powerful authority amongst us, and the prevalent doctrine of the duty and happiness of doing as one likes, and asserting our personal liberty, must tend to prevent the erection of any very strict standard of excellence, the belief in any very paramount authority of right reason, the recognition of our best self as anything very recondite and hard to come at. ”