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The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty.

In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.

Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.

The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own.

Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,--the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

It is in periods like this that it behooves the people to be most watchful of those to whom they have intrusted power.

Limited as are the powers which have been granted, still enough have been granted to constitute a despotism if concentrated in one of the departments.

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Free labour has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.

On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been.

This declared indifference, but, as I must think, real, covert zeal, for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government,--that is despotism.

There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored.

Considering standing armies as dangerous to free governments in time of peace, I shall not seek to enlarge our present establishment, nor disregard that salutary lesson of political experience which teaches that the military should be held subordinate to the civil power.

The American system rests on the assertion of the equal right of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to freedom of conscience, to the culture and exercise of all his faculties.

The ancient republics absorbed the individual in the state--prescribed his religion and controlled his activity.

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class,—it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”

As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.