John R. Commons - Liberty Quotes

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Legally, the term liberty means absence of duty, or rather the limit of duty.

John R. Commons
The smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity — a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.

John R. Commons
Liberty is absence of restraint. Freedom is participation in government.

John R. Commons
Liberty, as such, is only the negative of duty, the absence of restraint or compulsion.

John R. Commons
Liberty is as much a matter of compulsion as duty, but where duty says to a person that he must or must not, liberty says to other persons that they must not interfere with that person, or that they even must help to prevent still other persons from interfering, if necessary.

John R. Commons
The concept of property itself had come up out of the common law and carried with it the idea of a natural, or common-law rights of liberty to acquire, use and dispose of physical things.

John R. Commons
The 'liberty' of one is his permission to act as he pleases, supported against interference by the power of the concern or government
of which he is a member.

John R. Commons