Hugo Grotius Quotes on Politics
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), the Dutch jurist whose On the Law of War and Peace (De Iure Belli ac Pacis, 1625) gave early-modern European political thought its founding systematic treatise on international law, defended the case that the principles regulating the relations of sovereign states could be derived from a natural law accessible to human reason independently — as Grotius famously wrote, even were we to grant what cannot be granted without great wickedness, that there is no God. The framework grounds the political authority of the sovereign in the consent of the governed rather than in divine right, supplies a systematic theory of just war based on natural-law principles, and supplied the philosophical resources on which the subsequent Hobbes-Locke-Pufendorf tradition would build.
Quotes
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Attributed to Hugo Grotius:
“A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason.”
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Attributed to Hugo Grotius:
“The state is a perfect body of free men, united for the enjoyment of right and the common interest.”
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Attributed to Hugo Grotius:
“Where the rights of war are unsettled, those of peace will be unstable.”
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“Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves.”
As quoted in The Word Book Complete Word Power Library , Volume 1 (1981), p. 324 -
“The Most Excellent Hugo Grotius His Three Books Treating of the Rights of War and Peace ... Translated Into English by W. Evats, B.D., p. 426”
So is there no kind of life more wicked than that of mercenary Souldiers, who without any respect had to the equity of the Cause, fight only for plunder and pay.