Tom G. Palmer Quotes

The love of individual freedom has stood in the way of the appreciation of social obligations.

No one can be a good citizen unless he fulfills those domestic duties which are incumbent on his social station and unless he honors all his obligations to society.

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

'We, The People' is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other.

We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.

Throughout America's young history there has been a necessary tension between the individual and the group.

The right to private property is inconceivable without responsibilities to the common good.

All people owe their lives to surrounding society.

When each citizen submits himself to the authority of law he does not thereby decrease his independence or freedom, but rather increases it. By recognizing that he is a part of a larger body which is banded together for a common purpose, he becomes more than an individual, he rises to a new dignity of citizenship. Instead of finding himself restricted and confined by rendering obedience to public law, he finds himself protected and defended and in the exercise of increased and increasing rights.

Within each country’s borders, different view exist of the obligations of individual citizens to one another, of provinces and cities to their neighbors, of the large and the small entities to the polity—corporations, churches, and other institutions—to society as a whole.

You cannot just exercise your rights and get away without performing your responsibilities. Understand that it should not be about 'me' but rather 'us.'

The masses are our masters; and for every one who looks facts in the face his existence has become dependent on them, so that the thought of them must control his doings, his cares, and his duties.

He who would dare to undertake to establish a nation would have to feel himself capable of altering, so to speak, human nature, to transform each individual, who by his very nature is a unique and perfect whole, into a mere part of a greater whole, from which this individual would in a sense receive his life and his being.

Duties and rights are reciprocal

We too often prefer the individual thrill to collective responsibility.

No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.

It is ... difficult to induce a number of free beings to co-operate for their mutual benefit.

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

The public interest is more than the sum total of the interest groups.

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.

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

Every Government has certain moral and physical qualities engrafted in their very nature,-one operates on the sentiments of men, the other on their fears

The right to private property is valid, but all private property is under a "social mortgage.

Private property is a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of that society, wherever its necessities shall require it…

We have a stake in one another ... what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart