All quotes

Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves

Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long in freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.

Why do they expect virtue from a slave, or from a being whom the constitution of civil society has rendered weak, if not vicious?

Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other, arising from their necessary and unavoidable relations; which rights and duties there is no common human authority to protect and enforce.

Such persons should recollect that without law there can be no real practical liberty; that when law is trampled under foot tyranny rules, whether it appears in the form of a military despotism or of popular violence.

Free trade in labour and equality of training, intellectual or physical, is essential if the organic aptitudes of a sex or class are to be determined.

the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market

The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.

It is the function of religion not to destroy our nature but to fulfil it.

We gain our freedom when we attain our truest nature.

with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact

Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.

While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government.

Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people.

neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with the equal protection principle when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature -- equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.

We have it in our power to begin the world over again

When the world was over run with tyranny the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescue.

Government with insolence is despotism; but when contempt is added it becomes worse; and to pay for contempt is the excess of slavery.

The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting its government.