England, 1632–1704
John Locke
English empiricist and political theorist. Argued the mind begins as a blank slate and that legitimate government rests on consent.
John Locke in 34 lines
Every John Locke passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”
“The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
“But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression.”
“To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.”
“Sophistry is only fit to make men more conceited in their ignorance.”
“This life affords no solid satisfaction, but in the consciousness of having done well, and the hopes of another life.”
“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”
“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
“There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.”
“Preference of vice to virtue, a manifest wrong judgment.”
“The boundaries of the species, whereby men sort them, are made by men.”
“He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.”
“I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.”
“He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not seek long for instances of his ignorance.”
“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.”
“Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.”
“All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.”
“Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it”
“Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. Thus no Body has any Right to but himself.”
“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.”
“Government has no other end than the preservation of property.”
“Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.”
“A sound mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.”
“Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison'd the fountain.”
“Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided.”
“Children (nay, and men too) do most by example.”
“We are all a sort of camelions, that still take a tincture from things near us; nor is it to be wonder'd at in children, who better understand what they see than what they hear.”
“Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.”
“If pains be to be taken to give him a manly air and assurance betimes, it is chiefly as a fence to his virtue when he goes into the world under his own conduct.”
“Children have as much mind to shew that they are free, that their own good actions come from themselves, that they are absolute and independent, as any of the proudest of you grown men, think of them as you please.”
“The beauty or uncomeliness of many things, in good and ill breeding, will be better learnt, and make deeper impressions on them, in the examples of others, than from any rules or instructions can be given about them.”
“The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, into which a young gentleman should be enter'd by degrees, as he can bear it; and the earlier the better, so he be in safe and skillful hands to guide him.”
“The reservedness and distance that fathers keep, often deprive their sons of that refuge which would be of more advantage to them than an hundred rebukes or chidings.”
“You have not that power you ought to have over him, till he comes to be more afraid of offending so good a friend than of losing some part of his future expectation.”
Where John Locke lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
You notice a loophole that benefits you and hurts no one visibly.
You are treating trust as a shared structure, not a private feeling. The risk is expecting institutions to reward integrity fairly.
You open your phone for one minute and lose twenty.
You are noticing that choice is shaped by architecture. The risk is letting structure erase your agency.
More money would help, but the chase is changing your days.
You are recognizing that resources can widen choice. The danger is letting means quietly become the master end.
Public life feels ugly, exhausting, and still important.
You are choosing repair over spectacle. The risk is underestimating systems that require larger pressure.
Lessons that quote John Locke
- Consent & Rights — Where a government's authority comes from
- The Self Through Time — What makes you the same person?
Reading John Locke today
John Locke wrote in 1632–1704, from England — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, John Locke is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 34 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Baruch Spinoza — Netherlands, 1632–1677
- David Hume — Scotland, 1711–1776
- Immanuel Kant — Prussia, 1724–1804
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Switzerland/France, 1712–1778
- Jeremy Bentham — UK, 1748–1832
- Mary Wollstonecraft — England, 1759–1797
Argues the same cases
David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus take positions on the same dilemmas as John Locke, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.