On Liberty

“the end of man, or that which is pre­scribed by the eternal or im­mut­able dic­tates of reason, and not sug­ges­ted by vague and tran­si­ent de­sires, is the highest and most har­mo­ni­ous de­vel­op­ment of his powers to a com­plete and con­sist­ent whole;”

The great writers to whom the world owes what re­li­gious liberty it pos­sesses, have mostly as­ser­ted free­dom of con­science as an in­de­feas­ible right, and denied ab­so­lutely that a hu­man be­ing is ac­count­able to oth­ers for his re­li­gious be­lief.

“The grand, lead­ing prin­ciple, to­wards which every ar­gu­ment un­fol­ded in these pages dir­ectly con­verges, is the ab­so­lute and es­sen­tial im­port­ance of hu­man de­vel­op­ment in its richest di­versity.”

“I can say noth­ing which could de­scribe, even in the faintest man­ner, what that loss was and is. But be­cause I know that she would have wished it, I en­deav­our to make the best of what life I have left, and to work for her pur­poses with such di­min­ished strength as can be de­rived from thoughts of her, and com­mu­nion with her memory.”

So­ci­ety can pun­ish him for acts or even opin­ions which are an­ti­so­cial in char­ac­ter.

is nat­ur­ally a polit­ical an­imal, that he lived un­der strict so­cial laws as a mere item, al­most a non­entity, as com­pared with the Order, So­ci­ety, or Com­munity to which he be­longed, and that such priv­ileges as he sub­sequently ac­quired have been ob­tained in vir­tue of his grow­ing im­port­ance as a mem­ber of a grow­ing or­gan­isa­tion.

ideal of in­di­vidual free­dom is not the ideal of So­cial­ism,

I claim, as a cit­izen, a right to le­gis­late whenever my so­cial rights are in­vaded by the so­cial act of an­other.” And now for the defin­i­tion of these “so­cial rights.” “If any­thing in­vades my so­cial rights, cer­tainly the traffic in strong drink does. It des­troys my primary right of se­cur­ity, by con­stantly cre­at­ing and stim­u­lat­ing so­cial dis­order. It in­vades my right of equal­ity, by de­riv­ing a profit from the cre­ation of a misery, I am taxed to sup­port. It im­pedes my right to free moral and in­tel­lec­tual de­vel­op­ment, by sur­round­ing my path with dangers, and by weak­en­ing and de­mor­al­ising so­ci­ety, from which I have a right to claim mu­tual aid and in­ter­course

Thus, in the eight­eenth cen­tury, when nearly all the in­struc­ted, and all those of the un­in­struc­ted who were led by them, were lost in ad­mir­a­tion of what is called civil­isa­tion, and of the mar­vels of mod­ern sci­ence, lit­er­at­ure, and philo­sophy, and while greatly over­rat­ing the amount of un­like­ness between the men of mod­ern and those of an­cient times, in­dulged the be­lief that the whole of the dif­fer­ence was in their own fa­vour; with what a salut­ary shock did the para­doxes of Rousseau ex­plode like bomb­shells in the midst, dis­lo­cat­ing the com­pact mass of one-sided opin­ion, and for­cing its ele­ments to re­com­bine in a bet­ter form and with ad­di­tional in­gredi­ents.

A per­son should be free to do as he likes in his own con­cerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in act­ing for an­other, un­der the pre­text that the af­fairs of an­other are his own af­fairs.