Algernon Sidney Quotes

35 quotes in 419 categories

• [L]iberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the people are corrupted . . .
• [A]ll popular and well-mixed governments [republics] . . . are ever established by wise and good men, and can never be upheld otherwise than by…
• Fruits are always of the same nature with the seeds and roots from which they come, and trees are known by the fruits they bear:…
• [I]f vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.
• If the public safety be provided, liberty and propriety secured, justice administered, virtue encouraged, vice suppressed, and the true interest of the nation advanced, the…
• Violence and fraud can create no right.
• Machiavel, discoursing on these matters, finds virtue to be so essentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of liberty, that he thinks it impossible for…
• The only ends for which governments are constituted, and obedience rendered to them, are the obtaining of and protection; and they who cannot provide for…
• Nay, all laws must fall, human societies that subsist by them be dissolved, and all innocent persons be exposed to the violence of the most…
• Everyone sees they cannot well live asunder, nor many together, without some rule to which all must submit.
• God leaves to Man the choice of Forms in Government; and those who constitute one Form, may abrogate it.
• Laws and constitutions ought to be weighed... to constitute that which is most conducing to the establishment of justice and liberty.
• Many things are unknown to the wisest, and the best men can never wholly divest themselves of passions and affections... nothing can or ought to…
• No right can come by conquest, unless there were a right of making that conquest.
• That is the best Government, which best provides for war.
• There may be a hundred thousand men in an army, who are all equally free; but they only are naturally most fit to be commanders…
• Tis hard to comprehend how one man can come to be master of many, equal to himself in right, unless it be by consent or…
• Who will wear a shoe that hurts him, because the shoe-maker tells him 'tis well made?
• It is not necessary to light a candle to the sun
• Swords were given to men, that none might be Slaves, but such as know not how to use them.

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