27 Quotes by William Ernest Hocking

No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard.

We cannot swing up a rope that is attached only to our own belt.

Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure.

And indeed, no man has found his religion until he has found that for which he must sell his goods and his life.

For those who have only to obey, law is what the sovereign commands. For the sovereign, in the throes of deciding what he ought to command, this view of law is singularly empty of light and leading. In the dispersed sovereignty of modern states, and especially in times of rapid social change, law must look to the future as well as to history and precedent, and to what is possible and right as well as to what is actual.

Pure community is a matter of no interest to any will; but a community which pursues a common good is of supreme interest to all wills; and what we have here said is that whatever the nature of that common good ... it must contain the development of individual powers, as a prior condition for all other goods.

The only thing that can set aside a law as wrong is a better law, or an idea of a better law. And the only thing that an give a law the quality of better or worse is the concrete result which it promotes or fails to promote.

It is right, or absolute right, that an individual should develop the powers that are in him. He may be said to have a "natural right" to become what he is capable of becoming. This is his only natural right.

Without good-will, no man has any presumptive right, except the right or opportunity to change his will, so long as there is hope of it.