Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
As soon as laws are necessary for men, they are no longer fit for freedom.
The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.
Our constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws, not of men.
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.
Every man should have laws of his own, I should think; commandments of his own, for every man has a different set of circumstances wherein to work - or worry.
To the extent that laws are founded on morality and on logic, they can lead men's hearts and minds.
The primary problem in many modernizing societies is not liberty but the creation of a legitimate public order. Men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order.
It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men's property, which they had not before, as individuals.
A government of laws, and not of men.
It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free.