💬 Quotes

"To be a man is to be placed in a dilemma; to be a Christian is to be in the only position that can deal with it."

"It is the test of a good religion that you can make jokes about it."

"Dare to do right, dare to be true, / You have a work that no other can do."

"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

"The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations."

"When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

"In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning... when of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, *is* and *is not*, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an *ought*, or an *ought not*."

"All kinds of reasoning consist in nothing but a comparison, and a discovery of such relations, either constant or inconstant, as the objects bear to each other."

"Belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cognitive part of our natures."

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye."

"He that can take up and poise all the reasons that come can weigh and discern, that is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."

"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

"Truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"

"Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point that human capacity can soar to."

"All opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest."

"Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent."

"The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, 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."

"Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a 'property' in his own 'person': this nobody has any right to but himself. The 'labour' of his body, and the 'work' of his hands, we may say, are properly his."

"Freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary will of another man."

"Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience."