“Instead of resentment, or thinking that you can lay the blame on anyone but yourselves, know that to be free is the same as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal with your own goods, and abstinent from another’s, and, lastly, to be magnanimous and brave; so to be the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave. You, therefore, who wish to remain free, either instantly be wise, or as soon as possible cease to be fools; if you think slavery an intolerable evil, learn obedience to right reason and the rule of yourselves; and finally bid adieu to your dissensions, your jealousies, your superstitions, your outrages, your rapine, your lusts. Unless you will spare no pains to effect this, you must be judged, by God, man, and your very deliverers, unfit to be entrusted with the possession of liberty and the administration of the government.” – John Milton, “Defensio Secunda” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
Month: May 2026
“Permit the free discussion of truth without any hazard to the author, or any subjection to the caprice of an individual, which is the best way to make truth flourish and knowledge abound.” – John Milton, “Defensio Secunda” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“Since there are often in a state men who have the same itch for making a multiplicity of laws as some poetasters have for making many verses, and since laws are usually worse in proportion as they are more numerous, I trust that you will not enact so many new laws as you abrogate old ones which do not operate so much as warnings against evil but rather as impediments in the way of good; and that you will retain only those which are necessary, which do not confound the distinctions of good and evil, and which, while they prevent the frauds of the wicked, do not prohibit the innocent freedoms of the good, which punish crimes without interdicting those things which are lawful, only on account of the abuses to which they may occasionally be exposed. For the intention of laws is to check the commission of vice; but liberty is the best school of virtue, and affords the strongest encouragements to its practice. Then, I trust that you will make a better provision for the education of our youth.” – John Milton, “Defensio Secunda” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“Absolute lordship and Christianity are inconsistent.” – John Milton, “Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“Civil power neither hath right nor can do right by forcing religious things.” – John Milton, “Of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“Colonel Hall, his regimental headquarters group, and the men of 1/8 had spent the night at the line of departure, waiting in vain for orders to land on Betio. Although division had issued such an order, on the afternoon of D-Day, the message had not reached the regimental commander. Finally, at 0200 on the morning of 21 November [1943], Hall was contacted and told to report the position of 1/8 and the condition of its men. He replied that his Marines, in boats near the control vessel, were ‘resting easy,’ a surprisingly cheerful description of men that had spent over 12 hours in bobbing landing craft.” – Henry I. Shaw, Jr., Bernard C. Nalty, and Edwin T. Turnbladh, Central Pacific Drive, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Volume III, Part II, “The Gilberts Operation”
“The laws of nature and of common equity are the foundation of all laws (truly and properly so called) and whatsoever venditateth itself under the name or notion of a law, being built besides this foundation, wanteth the essence and true nature of a law, and so can be but equivocally such.” – John Goodwin, “Right and Might Well Met” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“When any two laws encounter one the other in any such exigent or strait of time that both of them cannot be obeyed, the law of inferior consequence ought to give place to that of superior, and the duty enjoined in this to be done though that required in the other be left undone.” – John Goodwin, “Right and Might Well Met” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“When religious men break out of the way of righteousness and truth, with the renitency and obmurmuration of their judgments and consciences, it is a sign that their judgments and consciences are yet at liberty and in condition to reduce them; but when these are confederate with their lust, there is little hope of their repentance.” – John Goodwin, “Right and Might Well Met” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“According to the notion of that maxim in natural philosophy, that the corruption of the best is worst, so are the miscarriages and errors of the best men of worst consequence in many cases. The digressions of men religious are many times worse than the thorough discourses of other men. When conscience and concupiscence meet (as oft they do in religious men), the conjunction is very fiery.” – John Goodwin, “Right and Might Well Met” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“It is a ruled case amongst wise men, ‘that if a people be depraved and corrupt, so as to confer places of power and trust upon wicked and undeserving men, they forfeit their power in this behalf unto those that are good, though but a few.’” – John Goodwin, “Right and Might Well Met” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“When the pilot or master of a ship at sea be either so far overcome and distempered with drink or otherwise disabled, as through a phrenetical passion or sickness of any kind, so that he is incapable of acting the exigencies of his place for the preservation of the ship, being now in present danger either of running upon a quick sand or splitting against a rock, &c, any one or more of the inferior mariners, having skill, may, in order to the saving of the ship and of the lives of all that are in it, very lawfully assume, and act according to, the interest of a pilot or master, and give orders and directions to those with them in the ship accordingly, who stand bound, at the peril of their lives, in this case to obey them.” – John Goodwin, “Right and Might Well Met” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“A contract, the conditions whereof are violated by neither side, cannot be dissolved but by the joint consent of both; and in buying and selling, and in all contracts unviolated, the sole will of neither side can violate the contract; of this speaketh the law. We hold that the law saith with us that vassals lose their farm if they pay not what is due. Now what are kings but vassals to the state, who, if they turn tyrants, fall from their right?” – Samuel Rutherford, “Lex Rex” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“There is not a stricter obligation moral betwixt king and people than betwixt parents and children, master and servant, patron and clients, husband and wife, the lord and the vassal; between the pilot of a ship and the passengers, the physician and the sick, the doctor and the scholars; but the law granteth, if these betray their trust committed to them, they may be resisted.” – Samuel Rutherford, “Lex Rex” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“Simply and absolutely the people is above and more excellent than the king, and the king in dignity inferior to the people.” – Samuel Rutherford, “Lex Rex” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“There be no mutual contract made upon certain conditions, but if the conditions be not fulfilled the party injured is loosed from the contract.” – Samuel Rutherford, “Lex Rex” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“Every man by nature is a free man born, that is, by nature no man cometh out of the womb under any civil subjection to king, prince, or judge, to master, captain, conqueror, teacher, &c, because freedom is natural to all.” – Samuel Rutherford, “Lex Rex” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“Strength as strength victorious, is not law nor reason.” – Samuel Rutherford, “Lex Rex” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“The first, the ultimate, and native subject of all power is the community, as reasonable men naturally inclining to a society ; but the ethical and political subject, or the legal and positive receptacle, of this power is various, according to the various constitutions of the policy.” – Samuel Rutherford, “Lex Rex” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“If all men be born, as concerning civil power, alike (for no man cometh out of the womb with a diadem on his head, or a sceptre in his hand), and yet men united in a society may give crown and sceptre to this man, and not to this man, then this power was in this united society.” – Samuel Rutherford, “Lex Rex” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“It most seldom chanceth that kings so temper themselves that their will never swerveth from that which is just and right; again, that they be furnished with so great sharpness of judgment and wisdom that every one of them seeth so much as is sufficient. Therefore the fault or default of men maketh that it is safer and more tolerable that many should have the government, that they may mutually one help another, one teach and admonish another, and if any advance himself higher than is meet, there may be overseers and masters to restrain his wilfulness.” – John Calvin, “Institution of Christian Religion” (trans. Thomas Norton, in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“The reason of man can only imperfectly judge—nay, and is often therein cozened—hence it must needs follow that all human constitutions are of necessity liable to imperfection, error, and injustice.” – William Ames, “Conscience” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“A division of things is by the law of nations. Nevertheless, by the common consent it may, upon just grounds, be somewhere enacted that almost all possessions should be in common.” – William Ames, “Conscience” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)
“Man cannot survive on righteous vindication alone.” – Trae Crowder, Liberal Redneck
“Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?” – Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (emphasis in original)
“To be taken in hand and led, like being a child again, even without the innocence, a child—it’s like being given a prize, an extra slice of childhood when you least expect it.” – Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
“Your smallest action sets off another somewhere else, and is set off by it. Keep an eye open, an ear cocked. Tread warily, follow instructions.” – Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
“The only beginning is birth and the only end is death—if you can’t count on that, what can you count on?” – Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
“All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.” – Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
“Let all that preach or print affix their names that we may know from whom. The contrary is a kind of unwarrantable modesty at the best. If it be truth they write, why do they not own it? If untruth, why do they write? Some such must either suppress themselves for shame or fear, and they that dare not own what they do, they suspect the magistrate or themselves.” – John Saltmarsh, “Smoke in the Temple” (in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty)