Quote

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.

William Ernest Hocking

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Ernest Hocking
Age: 92 †
Born: 1873
Born: August 10
Died: 1966
Died: June 12
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Cleveland
Ohio
W.E. Hocking
Become
Powers
May
Absolutes
Right
Absolute
Develop
Capable
Becoming
Natural
Individual

More quotes by William Ernest Hocking

Image
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.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished the others can only be hurt.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Nothing is more evident, I venture to think, as a result of two or three thousand years of social philosophizing, than that society must live and thrive by way of the native impulses of individual human beings.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Art is life, plus caprice.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
And indeed, no man has found his religion until he has found that for which he must sell his goods and his life.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
However rich we may become in knowledge of the deeper causes of historical results, we forgo all understanding of history if we forget this inner continuity,--i.e., the conscious intentions of the participants in history-making and their consciously known successes.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
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.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Principle II: The presumptions of the law are creative presumptions:: they are aimed at conditions to be brought about, and only for that reason ignore conditions which exist.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Principle I: Legal rights are presumptive rights.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Mr. Rihani, we met once a thousand years ago and we may not meet again for another thousand years.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Principle III: Presumptive rights are the conditions under which individual powers normally develop.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
We cannot swing up a rope which is attached only to our own belt.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
Every social need, such as the need for friendship, must be a party to its own satisfaction: I cannot passively find my friend as a ready-made friend a ready-made human being he may be, but his friendship for me I must help to create by my own active resolve.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
A person who wills to have a good will, already has a good will--in its rudiments. There is solid satisfaction in knowing that the mere desire to get out of an old habit is a material advance upon the condition of submergence in that habit. The longest step toward cleanliness is made when one gains--nothing but dissatisfaction with dirt.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
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.
William Ernest Hocking
Image
This merely formal conceiving of the facts of one's own wretchedness is at the same time a departure from them--placing them in the object. It is not idle, therefore, to observe reflexively that in that very Thought, one has separated himself from them, and is no longer that which empirically he still sees himself to be.
William Ernest Hocking