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Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg

nationalreview.com • A Brief History of Individual Rights | National Review

JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704) is the apostle of the Revolution of 1688, the most moderate and the most successful of all revolutions.

Bertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy

All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror

Jill Lepore • These Truths

Decades after the truce, John Locke—whose philosophy influenced the American founding fathers more than any other—wrote about human nature as if it were an “unknowable x.” He knew that disagreements over religion (Jerusalem) and over reason (Athens) were dangerous, so he declared the question of human nature an unfathomable idea that people would n... See more

The first comprehensive statement of the liberal philosophy is to be found in Locke, the most influential though by no means the most profound of modern philosophers.

Bertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy

Locke may be regarded as the founder of empiricism, which is the doctrine that all our knowledge (with the possible exception of logic and mathematics) is derived from experience.

Bertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy

Property is very prominent in Locke's political philosophy, and is, according to him, the chief reason for the institution of civil government: “The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property; to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting.”

Bertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy

affirms the concept of private property, possession, for the reason that John Locke did in the seventeenth century. It is the best defense of the individual against the state.

Jonathan Sacks • A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World's Oldest Religion

The nearest thing to a definition of the state of nature to be found in Locke is the following: “Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature.”