Harry A. Blackmun Quotes

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.

The prohibitions of the Constitution were put in place precisely to prevent majority opinion from ruling certain areas of life.

The individual is prior to society and society must be ordered to the good of the individual.

It is easy to defend the right of people to do things that fit in with the cultural norms of the majority. This includes practices that give personal pleasure but may be harmful, such as smoking or drinking. It is harder to argue for minority activities, especially those which stand out and may be obviously unsuitable in certain contexts.

Consistent conservatives should frame their views in accordance with the fundamental belief that individuals, not governments, have the right to determine the course of their own lives.

The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.

At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man...is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person's benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

I have only one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity.

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

Liberty is more precious than money or office; and we should be vigilant lest we purchase wealth or place at the price of inner freedom.

A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value.

Individualism regards man-every man-as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.

The individual cannot exist on his/her own and the collectivism should respect freedom of conscience. My struggle is about the freedom of thought.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

I support anyone's right to be who they want to be. My question is: to what extent do I have to participate in your self-image?

I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.

We are all equal in the sense that no man must mean - must be - the means for the purposes of another man; but each individual is an end in itself.

He may be a malevolent sorcerer, but Tiny Cooper is his own goddamned man, and if he wants to be a gigantic skipper, then that's his right as a huge American.

Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.

A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.

Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself.

Liberty is always freedom from the government.