My own conviction is that philosophical education is required, moral education is required, psychological education is required, and that no free society can last without an appropriate philosophy and supporting culture. A free society requires and entails a whole set of values, a whole way of looking at people—at human relationships, at the relationship of the individual to the state—about which there has to be some decent level of consensus.
Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.
A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. Free society must fertilize the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.
In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.
The course of decision in this Court has thus far jealously enforced the principle of a free society secured by the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Its safeguards are not to be worn away by a process of devitalizing interpretation.
Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, ‘freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society’. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.
I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere.
Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like : the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.
The widespread use of the market reduces the strain on the social fabric by rendering conformity unnecessary with respect to any activities it encompasses. The wider the range of activities covered by the market, the fewer are the issues on which explicitly political decisions are required and hence on which it is necessary to achieve agreement. In turn, the fewer the issues on which agreement is necessary, the greater is the likelihood of getting agreement while maintaining a free society.
A free society means toleration, which in turn comes from openness of mind. But freedom also presupposes conviction; a free choice—unless it be wholly arbitrary (and then it would not be free)—comes from belief and ultimately from principle. A free society, then, cherishes both toleration and conviction.
If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.
But it is also true that in a free society an individual will be esteemed according to the manner in which he uses his freedom.
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, 'a new form of servitude.'
We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.
Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.
The principles of a free society describe not a hierarchy of superior and subordinate authorities but an archipelago of competing and overlapping jurisdictions. A free society is sustained to the extent that laws honour these principles and authorities operate within the laws.
A free society is an open society and, therefore the principles which describe its nature must be principles which admit the variability of human arrangements rather than fix or establish or uphold a determinate set of institutions within a closed order… the fundamental principle describing a free society is the principle of freedom of association. A first corollary of this is the principle of freedom of association. A second corollary is the principle of mutual toleration of associations.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with . It is an ideal which I hope to live for. But, my lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
The process of gradual abolition in New England actually inscribed the practices of slavery itself in what was quite arbitrarily defined as the "free society" to which it gave birth. The fact that New Englanders began extolling their "free society" the minute the ink was dry on the gradual emancipation statutes does not mean that the statutes inaugurated a state of being that differed materially from the one that existed before the statutes were passed.
Yet we can maintain a free society only if we recognize that in a free society no one can win all the time. No one can have his own way all the time, and no one is right all the time.
Regulating speech is a dangerous notion and, not compatible with the principles of a free society. The Founders recognized this, and thus explicitly prohibited Congress from making any laws that might abridge freedom of speech or of the press.
The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence. All initiation of force is a violation of someone else’s rights, whether initiated by and individual or the state,…
The danger to a free society is not the guns owned by the citizens but an unconstrained government, especially one that is better armed than the public. An armed society is a self-governing society, just as a disarmed people are vulnerable to arbitrary power of every kind.
Electoral politics has never succeeded in achieving a free society.
The American project of bringing a free society to Iraq could not possibly have worked. Why not? Because a free society requires a free market, and the American regime of conquest was founded on socialist planning by the state.
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.