William Blackstone Quotes About Liberty

Quotes about: Liberty

• Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolate. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture.

  William Blackstone

  Men, Rights, Law

  William Blackstone (1922). “Commentaries on the Laws of England: In Four Books”, p.45, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

• The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state: but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.

  William Blackstone

  Liberty, Matter, Criminals

  Sir William Blackstone, Joseph Chitty, Edward Christian, John Eykyn Hovenden, Thomas Lee (1861). “Commentaries on the laws of England: in four books, with an analysis of the work”

• The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights.

  William Blackstone

  Rights, Liberty, Internet

  Sir William Blackstone, Edward Christian, John Frederick Archbold, Joseph Chitty (1827). “Commentaries on the Laws of England”, p.101

• Trial by jury is a privilege of the highest and most beneficial nature [and] our most important guardian both of public and private liberty. The liberties of England cannot but subsist so long as this palladium remains sacred and inviolate, not only from all open attacks, ... but also from all secret machinations, which may sap and undermine it.

  William Blackstone

  Long, Secret, Important

• If [the legislature] will positively enact a thing to be done, the judges are not at liberty to reject it, for that were to set the judicial power above that of the legislature, which would be subversive of all government.

  William Blackstone

  Government, Judging, Rejection

• The law, which restrains a man from doing mischief to his fellow citizens, though it diminishes the natural, increases the civil liberty of mankind.

  William Blackstone

  Men, Law, Liberty

  Sir William Blackstone (1794). “Commentaries on the laws of England”, p.128

• That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.

  William Blackstone

  Kings, Government, Political

  Commentaries on the Laws of England bk. 3, ch. 17 (1768) See Proverbs 160

• And these great natural rights may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man's natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense.

  William Blackstone

  Wisdom, Men, Rights

  Sir William BLACKSTONE, Samuel Warren (1856). “Blackstone's Commentaries systematically abridged and adapted to the existing state of the law and constitution, with great additions. By Samuel Warren”, p.101

• In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and wherever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

  William Blackstone

  Men, Law, Two

  Commentaries on the Laws of England bk. 1, ch. 2 (1765)

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