John Locke

Sir Godfrey Kneller painted me in 1697, when I was sixty-five and had been back in England for eight years after years of exile in the Dutch Republic. I do not look well. I was not well — I had suffered from asthma since my thirties. I had also spent much of my adult life in fear of execution: I had been involved with the Earl of Shaftesbury, whose plots...

Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it — and reason is that law.

The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters — how comes it to be furnished? From experience.

Wherever law ends, tyranny begins. Government has no other end but the preservation of property — by which I mean life, liberty, and estate. A people may not be taxed without their consent.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

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. Those who confuse law with tyranny have understood neither.

The mind at birth is a white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. Everything we know, we know through experience — either sensation from the external world or reflection on our own mental operations. There is no knowledge that was not first in the senses.

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience. I wrote this against the tradition of innate ideas and against all those who claim special revelation as a source of political authority. If you cannot show me where your knowledge came from, I am under no obligation to accept it.

The labour of a man's body and the work of his hands are properly his. Whensoever he removes anything out of the state that nature has provided, he has mixed his labour with it, and thereby makes it his property. Government exists to protect this, not to override it.

Toleration is the chief characteristic mark of the true church. For whatever some people boast of the antiquity of places and names, or of the pomp of their outward worship, others, of the reformation of their discipline — if they persecute others, they are not Christians. No one can be forced to salvation.

Wherever law ends, tyranny begins. A king who puts himself above the law has dissolved the social compact that gave him authority. The people are then free — more than free, obligated — to resist. The right of revolution is not anarchy. It is the final guarantee against tyranny.

I wrote the Two Treatises of Government in the late 1670s but published them anonymously in 1689, after the Glorious Revolution had already occurred. This timing allowed some to read them as justification for what had just happened, which suited me well enough.

The argument of the Second Treatise is the one that mattered for everything that followed:...