John Locke: 10 quotes on his birthday

Called "the Father of Classical Liberalism," John Locke, was born on August 29, 1632 in Warington, England. One of the most influential thinkers of th 17th century, he attended Westminister School and later Christ Church, University of Oxford, where he studied classics and medicine. When England's King James II was overthrown in 1689, Locke published "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ," arguing against innate ideas and suggesting instead that man is born a tabula rasa, a blank slate, who learns through experience. In 1690, Locke published his most significant political work, "The Two Treaties of Government," arguing that the role of the state is to protect the natural rights of its citizens based on the notion of a social contract. If a ruler fails to fulfill his contract with his citizens, Locke argued that the citizens have the right to overthrow their leader and appoint a new one. Locke’s writings have had a powerful impact on the thinkers that have come since, including Voltaire and the Founding Fathers of the United States, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. 

1. New ideas

Photo by Sir Godfrey Kneller, public domain

"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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