Topic: Free Agency, Matches 41 quotes.

Let us not think even for a moment that liberty is the gift of any government or any nation. Oh, no! Life and liberty are our inalienable rights and were vouchsafed unto us in that primeval council when our great champion, even Jesus Christ, said: “Here am I, send me” for he came and organized this earth as a dwelling place for the children of God, for you and me:

To live and to be free,
To worship God alone
As conscience guideth me,
As my own heart is prone;
For these are rights God given,
He gave them all to me
They emanate from heaven,
E’en life and liberty.

This is the thought that comes into my mind when I contemplate the history of the world, that Providence is over all.

Source: Elder Rulon S. Wells
General Conference, October 1926

Topics: Free Agency; Liberty

The Meaning of Freedom

Although the promised land was a land of liberty for the people of Nephi under the reign of the righteous kings, this liberty depended more on the people’s obedience to the commandments of God than on the presence or absence of kings (2 Nephi 1:7). It is difficult to envision a people more free than those in the days of Benjamin and Mosiah. They were free to believe, worship, and act as they pleased, restrained only by the laws of justice and mercy which had been revealed “by the hand of the Lord” (Mosiah 29:25). As defined by Elder Dallin H. Oaks, “Free agency . . . means an exercise of the will, the power to choose; . . . freedom [means] the power and privilege to carry out [one’s] choices” (38). The transition from kings to judges did not increase anyone’s free agency, but it did give everyone an increased freedom to act, accompanied by an equal weight of responsibility. Government by the voice of the people gives the people the greatest possible latitude to act out those choices which their God-given free agency allows them to make.

Source: Byron R. Merrill
Mosiah, Salvation Only Through Christ, p. 119 - 120

Topics: Free Agency

Few of us seem to want to keep government out of our personal affairs and responsibilities. Many of us seem to favor various types of government-guaranteed and compulsory “security.” We say that we want personal freedom, but we demand government housing, government price controls, government-guaranteed jobs and wages. We boast that we are responsible persons, but we vote for candidates who promise us special privileges, government pensions, and government subsidies.

Many of us are drifting back to that old concept of government that our forefathers feared and rejected. Many of us are now looking to government for security. Many of us are no longer willing to accept individual responsibility for our own welfare. Yet personal freedom cannot exist without individual responsibility.

Source: Dean Russell
Personal Freedom and Individual Responsibility

Topics: Free Agency; Politics

Blue Eagles and Déjà Vu

If the proponents of central planning came right out and said they wanted to create an economic police state, their cause would never get off the ground. So, they resort to “doublespeak,” as Mario Pei so aptly called it, the usual camouflage for the ultimate use of force against the individual. Ludwig von Mises summed it up when he wrote: “All this talk: the state should do this or that ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously. In such proposals as: let us raise farm prices, let us raise wage rates, let us lower profits . . . the us ultimately refers to the police. Yet, the authors of these projects protest that they are planning for freedom and industrial democracy.”

Perhaps the oldest lesson of history is that an assault on one aspect of freedom is an attack on the whole, as the framers of the Constitution were well aware. To think that the bell that tolls for economic freedom does not toll for academic freedom or for freedom of the press is a delusion, and a dangerous one . . . .

All current proposals for a managed economy rest on an underestimation of the intelligence of the American people. They assume that you and I are just not smart enough to decide how to spend the money we earn.

Source: Walter Wriston
The Freeman, September 1975

Topics: Free Agency; Government

Freedom is a natural condition; each individual controls himself.

It is also a condition of total risk. Each individual has the ability to impose cruelty and even death upon his fellows. This ability conceals a two-way street. Each individual is vulnerable to the thoughts and actions of others of his own kind. A free society is a society in which anyone could do as he pleases with himself or with others. Given a “society” of only one person, risk between all persons disappears. In such a society, the word freedom could not possibly have a social context.

But now we imagine a society in which total freedom reigns yet there are many persons in it. Each individual can think and act as he pleases; at the same time, any other person has the ability to impose upon him by a little or a lot.

Take one further step. Imagine a free society in which the capacity for man’s inhumanity to man is not impeded by any human organization . . . but yet the violation of one’s person or property does not occur.

Such would be a free society, and only such. A society in which free men interact, retaining all their natural capacity to be free, and yet do nothing to limit the freedom of their fellows, ah, that is the goal yet to be achieved.

Source: Robert LeFevre
Thinking About Freedom, The Freeman, February 1983, p120-121

Topics: Free Agency

We have to accept some government limitations on freedom if we who live in communities are to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A condition of uninhibited individual freedom would allow the strong to oppress the weak. It would allow the eccentric desires of one person to restrict the freedom of many.

Interferences with our freedom do not deprive us of our free agency. When Pharaoh put Joseph in prison, he restricted Joseph’s freedom, but he did not take away his free agency. When Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple, he interfered with their freedom to engage in a particular activity at a particular time in a particular place, but he did not take away their free agency.

The Lord has told us in modern revelation that he established the Constitution of the United States to assure “that every many may act ... according to the moral agency which I have given unto him” (D&C 101:78). In other words, God established our Constitution to [10] give us the vital political freedom necessary for us to act upon our personal choices in civil government. This revelation shows the distinction between agency (the power of choice), which is God-given and freedom, the right to act upon our choices, which is protected by the Constitution and laws of the land.

Freedom is obviously of great importance, but, as these examples illustrate, freedom is always qualified in mortality. Consequently, it would be better if we did not conduct a public policy debate in terms of a loss of free agency, which is impossible under our doctrine. We ought to focus on the legality or wisdom of a proposed restriction of our freedom.

Source: Elder Dallin H. Oaks
Free Agency And Freedom
Forty-Fifth Annual Joseph Smith Memorial Service
LDS Institute of Religion, Logan, Utah
Sunday, January 17, 1988

Topics: Free Agency; Freedom

Slavery will not Prevail

In conclusion, I will hazard one suggestion:

Unless all history is reversed and its lessons and principles all blotted out, it is inconceivable that any system can be set up by a personal despot or by an oligarchy either of intellectuals or of cruel, heartless, ambitious men, that can permanently rob men of their freedom and put them in slavery. This never has been done. Sooner or later such a system has always broken down; it always will break down, because, despite what atheists and scoffers say or think, man is the child of God, who planted in man’s soul certain eternal concepts and urges that are stronger than mortal life or any of the intellectual or physical incidents of mortality.

Source: J. Reuben Clark
“Stand Fast by Our Constitution”, Page 79

Topics: Free Agency

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

Source: Ayn Rand
Essays on Liberty, vol 11, p106-7

Topics: Free Agency; Law

The state is called the government, but it cannot actually govern the individual acts of any person because of the nature of human energy. Men in public office are only men, and no man can control another’s thoughts, speech, or creative actions. No possible use of physical force can compel anyone to think, speak, or act. It can only limit, hinder, and prevent.

Source: Henry Grady Weaver
The Mainspring of Human Progress, p. 57.

Topics: Free Agency; Government, Power

•  ⟨⟨ 
•  ⟨ 
•   |  
•  ⟩ 
•  ⟩⟩