From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.
Our nation was founded on the principals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But unfortunately Locke treated ideas of reflection as if they were another class of objects of contemplation beside ideas of sensation.
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 only to have the law of nature for his rule.
It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator.
This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle - among others - that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error.
The United States of America was originally an experiment. But it was an experiment in recognizing God-given individual liberty and creating a government in which we no one is deemed better than another. And in which all of us are equal. Not equal in abilities, but equal in intrinsic worth and value.
The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea - and the idea was liberty.