Quotes for Exam 2

Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft

Locke

“Reader, you have here the beginning and end of a discourse concerning government … These [pages] … I hope are sufficient to establish the throne of our great restorer, our present King William; to make good his title, in the consent of the people … being the only one of all lawful governments .”

Locke

“… I should not speak so plainly [i.e., insultingly] of a gentlemen [Sir Robert] …had not the pulpit, of late years, publicly owned his [Robert’s] doctrine, and made it the current divinity of the times”

Locke

“Political power … I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defense of the commonwealth ...”

Locke

“[T]hough this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license … The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason, which is that law [of nature], teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions …”

Locke

“The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have the law of nature for his rule ...”

Locke

“And hence it is, that he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him … for nobody can have me in his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom, i.e., to make me a slave.”

Locke

“God, who has given the world to men in common, has also given them reason to make us of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience. The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being … all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common … and nobody has originally a private dominion, exclusive to the rest of mankind …”

Locke

“Though the earth … be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person ... The labor of his body, and the work of his hands ... are properly his … Whatsoever he removes out of that state of nature has provided … he has mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby made it his property …”

Locke

“God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it [to] them for their benefit … it cannot be supposed that he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it [the world] to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labor was to be his title to it;) …”

Locke

“The measure of property nature has well set by the extent of men’s labor and the conveniences of life; no man’s labor could subdue, or appropriate all; nor could his enjoyment consume more than a small part; so it was impossible for any man, in this way, to entrench upon the right of another … to the prejudice of his neighbor…”

Locke

“God has given us all things richly.” … is the voice of reason … But how far has he [God] given it to us? To enjoy. As much as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labor fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more than his share and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.”

Locke

“Nor [is] this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than yet unprovided could use … for he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by drinking of another man … who had a whole river of the same water left …”

Locke

“[T]his I boldly affirm … that everyman should have as much as he could make use of, would hold still in the world … had not the invention of money, and the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it … a little piece of yellow metal [i.e., gold], which would keep without wasting or decay …”

Locke

“… he might heap as much of these durable things as he pleased; the exceeding of the bounds of his just property not lying in the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of any thing uselessly in it.”

Locke

“[S]ince gold and silver, being little useful to the life of man in proportion to food or, raiment [i.e., clothes], and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men … it is plain that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out, a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use … which may be hoarded up without injury to anyone…”

Locke

“… it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases, that self-love will make men partial to themselves and their friends: and on the other side, that ill nature, passion and revenge will carry them too far in punishing others; and hence nothing but confusion or disorder will follow …”

Locke

“Man … has by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate … but to judge of, and punish the breaches of that law … [the alternative] is political society, where everyone of the members has quitted this natural power, [and] resigned it up into the hands of the community … [such that] the community comes to be umpire, by settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties; and by men having authority from the community …”

Locke

“The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property. To which in the state of nature there are many things wanting.”

Locke

“And thus that, which begins and actually constitutes any political society, is nothing but the consent of any number of freeman capable of a majority to unite and incorporate into such a society. And this is that, and that only, which did, or could give beginning to any lawful government in the world.”

Locke

“And thus the community perpetually retains a supreme power of saving themselves from the attempts and designs of anybody, even their legislators, whenever they shall be so foolish, or so wicked, as to lay and carry on designs against [people’s] liberties and properties …”

Locke

“[R]evolutions happen … if a long train of abuses, prevarications [lies] and artifices… make the design visible … it is not to be wondered that [the people] should rouse themselves … [to secure] the ends for which government was at first erected.”

Rousseau

“Some [e.g., Locke] have not hesitated to attribute to man in this state the idea of the just and the unjust … Others [e.g., Hobbes] have begun by assigning to the strongest the authority over the weakest ... Finally, all of them, talking endlessly about need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride, have brought into the state of nature ideas that they have derived from society.”

Rousseau

“Thus, I consider the subject of this Discourse to be one of the most interesting questions … how are we to know the source of inequality among men, if we do not begin by understanding men themselves? … the things that circumstances and [man’s] progress have added to or changed in his primitive state?”

Rousseau

“[S]etting aside all those scientific books, which teach us only to see men the way they have made themselves … I believe that I discern there two principles prior to reason: one makes us passionately interested in our well-being and in our own preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance at seeing any sensitive being perish or suffer, in particular, beings like ourselves.”

Rousseau

“Solitary, idle, and always close to danger, [original] man must like to sleep and have a light sleep … his own preservation is almost his only concern ... By contrast, the organs which do not improve except by softness and sensuality must remain in a coarse state, which prevents any kind of refined sensitivity in him.”

Rousseau

“[P]ity is a natural feeling that, by moderating in each individual the activities of his amour de soi-même, contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species. It is pity that prompts us without reflection to help those we see suffering and which, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue…”

Rousseau

“Let us conclude that wandering in the forests without labor, without speech … with no need for his fellow men … [original] man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, would have had only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to this state. He would have felt nothing but his true needs and looked only at what be believed he had an interest in seeing. His intelligence would have progressed further than his vanity … he could no more have communicated it than he could have recognized his own children … There was neither education nor progress. The generations multiplied aimlessly… and man remained a child.”

Rousseau

“Limited solely to the physical aspect of love, and happy enough to be ignorant of those preferences which stimulate sentiment and increase the difficulties it causes, men must feel the ardor of their temperaments less frequently and less vividly, and thus the disputes among them must be less cruel.”

Rousseau

“I confess that … the events … could have come about in several ways … [Yet] on the principles that I have just established, one could not form any other system which does not provide me with the same results and from which I could not draw the same conclusions.”

Rousseau

“…such was the life of an animal … scarcely profiting from the gifts that nature offered him … But difficulties soon presented themselves … the heights of trees which prevented him from reaching their fruits, the competition with animals who were seeking to eat these fruits, the ferocity …”

Rousseau

“The first man who … got the idea of saying “This is mine!” and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, what wars, what murders, what miseries and horrors would someone have spared the human race by … crying out to his fellows, “Stop listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the land belong to everyone and the earth to no one.”

Rousseau

“The habit of living together gave rise to the most tender feelings known to men: conjugal and paternal love. Each family became a small society ... It was then arose the first difference in the ways of life of the two sexes, which up to this point had only one … In this way … the two sexes lost something of their ferocity and vigor.”

Rousseau

“People grow accustomed … to making comparisons. They imperceptibly acquire ideas of merit and beauty, which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer go without seeing each other again … and at the least opposition turns into rage: jealously awakens with love …”

Rousseau

“Such is, in fact, the real cause of all these differences: the [original human] lives in himself; social man, always outside himself, cannot live but in the opinion of others, and it is, so to speak, only from their judgement that he derives the feeling of his own existence.”

Rousseau

“[N]o matter how free and independent man had been previously, there he was, subjected by a multitude of new needs … and above all to his fellow men ... If he is rich, he needs their services; if poor, he needs their help ... Thus, he must constantly seek to interest them in his lot …. This makes him deceitful and artificial …”

Rousseau

“… devouring ambition, the keen desire to raise his relative fortune, less from a real need than to set oneself above others, inspires in all men a dark tendency to inflict injuries on each other, a secret jealousy … more dangerous because … it often assumes a mask of goodwill ... All these effects are the inseparable attendants of emerging inequality…”

Rousseau

“[A]fter showing his neighbors the horrors of a situation which armed them all against the others … he [the rich owner] easily came up with specious reasons to lead them to his goal. “Let us unite,” he said to them, “to protect the weak from oppression … to assure to each man the possessions of what belongs to him. Let us set up rules and justice … subjecting the powerful and weak equally … instead of turning our forces against ourselves, let us collect them into one supreme power …”

Rousseau

“They all rushed headlong into their chains, believing they were ensuring their liberty. For although they had sufficient reason to sense the advantage of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers … Such was, or must have been, the origin of society and of laws, which provided new shackles for the weak and new powers for the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, [and] secured forever the law of property and inequality … all for the profit of a few ambitious men [who] subjected all the human race to labor, servitude, and misery.”

Rousseau

“In giving up [one’s freedom under a false contract] one degrades one’s being … Thus, it appears certain to me not only that governments did not begin through arbitrary power … but also that, even if this is the way they did begin, such power, being by nature illegitimate, could not have served as the foundation for the rights of society … Without entering today in investigations which still remain to be made on the nature of the fundamental pact of all governments [i.e., Rousseau’s Social Contract], I am … limiting myself to considering here the establishment of a genuine contract between the people and the leaders it chooses for itself…”

Rousseau

“Man is born free [or ‘should be freed’], and everywhere he is chains. Someone who believes he is the master of others does not escape being more enslaved than they. How did this transformation could about? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? This is a question I believe I can answer.”

Rousseau

“[T]he human race belongs to a hundred men … that is also Hobbes’s sentiment. And in this way, the human race is divided into herds of cattle, each of which has its chief, who guards it in order to devour it.”

Rousseau

“To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will [i.e., consent], at most an act of prudence. In what sense can that be a duty? … If we must obey because of force, we have no need to obey because it is our duty, and if we are no longer forced to obey, we have no obligation to do so. One can see, therefore, that this word right adds nothing to force … it signifies nothing at all.”

Rousseau

“These clauses [of the genuine social contract], properly understood, all come down to one, that is, the total alienation of each member of the association, along with all his rights; to the entire community … since each person gives himself entirely, the condition is equal for all, and since the conditions is the same for everyone, no one has an interest in making it burdensome for the others.”

Rousseau

“[E]ach individual, as a man, can have a particular will at odds with or different from the general will that he has as a citizen. His particular interest can speak to him in an entirely different way from the common interest.”

Rousseau

“For the same reason that sovereignty is inalienable, it is indivisible. For either the will is general, or it is not. It is the will of the body of the people or of merely a part. In the first case, this will, once declared is an act of sovereignty and makes law. In the second case, it is only a particular will or an act by a magistrate, at most a decree.”

Rousseau

“As long as the several men have assembled and consider themselves a single body, they have only a single will, which is concerned with communal preservation and general wellbeing. Then all the springs of the state are vigorous and simple, its principles clear and luminous, [since] there are no confused and contradictory interests … .”

Rousseau

“Since the sovereign has no other force than the legislative power, it acts only through laws, and since laws are only authentic acts of the general will, the sovereign cannot act except when the people is assembled.”

Rousseau

“When I say that the object of the laws is always general, I mean that the law considers the subjects as a body and actions in the abstract; it never considers a man as an individual or particular action. Hence, the law can readily decree that there will be privileges, but it cannot confer these on anyone by name… no function linked to the individual [i.e., particular] object is part of the legislative [i.e., constitutional] power .”

Rousseau

“When a law is proposed in the assembly of the people, what is being asked of them is not precisely whether they approve of the proposal or reject it, but whether or not it conforms to the general will, which is theirs. In giving his vote, each person delivers his opinion on this question, and the declaration of the general will is obtained by counting the votes. Thus, when an opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, that proves nothing other than I was mistaken and that my estimate of the general will was wrong.”

Rousseau

“There is often a significant difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter [the general will] considers only the common interest; the former [the will of all] considers the private interests and it is merely the sum of particular wills.”

Rousseau

“The better the state is constituted, the more public affairs predominate over private matters in the minds of citizens … In a well administered city, each person flies to the assemblies; under a bad government no one wants to take a single step … As soon as anyone says of state business, “What does that matter to me?” one should look upon the state as lost.”

Rousseau

“It is not sufficient for the people to have assembled once and set the constitution of the state by giving its sanction to a body of law. Nor is it sufficient that it have established a government for all time or once and for all organized the election of magistrates … there must be fixed and periodic [constitutional] assemblies that nothing can abolish or prorogue ...”

Rousseau

“It is not good for the person who creates the laws [i.e. the constitution] to execute them [i.e., administer and enforce them], or for the body of the people to turn its attention away from the general viewpoint in order to focus on particular things. Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests on public affairs ...”

Rousseau

“As the particular will is continuously working against the general will, so the government is constantly asserting itself against the sovereignty. The more this effort increases, the more the constitution changes for the worse, and since there is here no other corporate will resisting the will of the prince and establishing an equilibrium [or balance] with it, sooner or later, the time must come when the prince finally oppresses the sovereign and breaks the social treaty.”

Rousseau

“Someone will say: an assembly of people! What a chimera! It is a chimera nowadays, but it was not two thousand years ago … The boundaries of what is possible in moral matters are less narrow than what we think. What limits them is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices. Base souls do not believe in great men. Vile slaves smile with a mocking air at the word liberty…”

Rousseau

“To discover the best rules for society … it would be necessary to have a superior intelligence who perceived all the passions of men and experienced none of them, one who had no connection to our nature and yet understood it completely … Gods would be needed to give laws to men.”

Rousseau

“The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die from the moment of its birth and carries in itself the causes of its destruction.”

Rousseau

“If we take the term in the strict sense, a genuine democracy has never existed and never will ... It is impossible to imagine that the people would remain constantly assembled in order to attend to public business, and it is easy to see that it could not establish commissions to carry out this work without changing the form of the administration.”

Rousseau

“Free peoples, remember this precept: Liberty can be attained, but it can never be recovered.”

Wollstonecraft

“I anticipated the future improvement of the world, and … even carried my speculations so far as to advance a million or two years to the moment … Imagination went still farther, and pictured the state of man when the earth could no longer support him. Where was he to fly from universal famine? Do not smile: I really became distressed for these fellow creatures. The images fastened on me, and the world appeared a vast prison.”

Wollstonecraft

“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a perpetual state of childhood, unable to stand alone.”

Wollstonecraft

“Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence … I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue … and I should express my conviction with the energetic emotions that I feel whenever I think of the subject … I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style … I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart”

Wollstonecraft

“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them [women] their lost dignity—and make them as a part of the human species, by reforming themselves to reform the world.”

Wollstonecraft

“Contending for the rights of women, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she [woman] be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious [i.e. ineffective] with respect to its influence on general practice.”

Wollstonecraft

“Girls and boys … would play harmlessly together, if the distinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes any difference.—I will go further, and affirm, as an indisputable fact, that most of the women … who have acted like rational creatures … have accidentally been allowed to run wild…”

Wollstonecraft

“Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not keenly satirize our headstrong passions and groveling vices. — Behold, I should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on … Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of empower, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless …”

Wollstonecraft

“Girls and boys … would play harmlessly together, if the distinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes any difference.—I will go further, and affirm, as an indisputable fact, that most of the women … who have acted like rational creatures … have accidentally been allowed to run wild…”

Wollstonecraft

“Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not keenly satirize our headstrong passions and groveling vices. — Behold, I should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on … Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, empower, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless …”

Wollstonecraft

“I … speak of women who are restrained by principle or prejudice; such women, though they would shrink from an intrigue with real abhorrence, yet, nevertheless, wish to be convinced by the homage of gallantry that they are cruelly neglected by their husbands; or, days and weeks are spent in dreaming of the happiness enjoyed by congenial souls …””

Wollstonecraft

“Disgusted with artificial manners and virtues, the citizen of Geneva [i.e., Rousseau], instead of properly sifting the subject, threw away the wheat with the chaff …”

Wollstonecraft

“Impressed by this view of the misery and disorder which pervades society, and fatigued by the jostling against artificial fools, Rousseau became enamored of solitude, and, being at the same time an optimist, he labors with uncommon eloquence to prove that man was naturally a solitary animal … not aware that he was exalting one attribute [i.e., goodness] at the expense of another [i.e., reason], equally necessary for divine perfection.”

Wollstonecraft

“Rousseau, and most of the male writers who have followed his steps, have warmly inculcated that the whole tendency of female education ought to be directed to one point: to render them pleasing … [D]o they imagine that marriage can eradicate the habitude of life? … Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties?”

Wollstonecraft

“Reason is, consequently, the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth ….”

Wollstonecraft

“The power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations, is the only acquirement, for an immortal being, that really deserves the name knowledge … This power has not only been denied to women; but writers have insisted that it is inconsistent with their sexual character … everything conspires to render the cultivation of the understanding more difficult in the female than the male world.”

Wollstonecraft

“Girls and boys still together? I hear some readers ask: yes. And I should not fear any other consequence, than that some early attachment might take place; which, whilst it had the best effect on the moral character of the young people, might not perfectly agree with the views of the parents, for it will be a long time, I fear, before the world is so enlightened, that parents, only anxious to render their children virtuous, will let them choose companions for life themselves.”