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The public officials charged with executing the law might do injustice in heated controversy through unconscious pride of opinion and obstinacy of conclusion.
The complete collection
The public officials charged with executing the law might do injustice in heated controversy through unconscious pride of opinion and obstinacy of conclusion.
We should make every effort to prevent humiliating and degrading prohibition against any of our citizens wishing temporarily to sojourn in foreign countries because of race or religion.
a punishment must not by its severity be degrading to human dignity
that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials
If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment , it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.
Convince me that one man may rightfully make another man his slave, and I will no longer subscribe to the Declaration of Independence.
Every slave is a stolen man; every slaveholder is a man-stealer.
Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form--and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing--with indignation and abhorrence.
Show me the government which can be maintained only by destroying the rights of a portion of the people; and you will indicate the duty of openly revolting against it.
What you demand for yourselves, in virtue of your manhood, I demand for the enslaved at the South, on the same ground.
Arbitration is the true method of settlement of international as well as local or individual differences.
We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression.
Free speech--the glory of our system of government--should not be sacrificed on anything less than plain and objective proof of danger that the evil advocated is imminent.
The right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is therefore one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.
The vitality of civil and political institutions in our society depends on free discussion.
The first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves.
It is never wrong to do the right thing.
You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time
Attribution contested
No contemporaneous record of Lincoln saying this survives. It first appears in recollections published decades after his death, and has also been credited to P. T. Barnum. Even the wording is unstable: this is McClure's 1901 text, which differs from the version usually quoted today. Treat the phrasing as the compiler's, not Lincoln's.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Wrongly attributed
Voltaire never wrote this. Evelyn Beatrice Hall composed the sentence in 1906 to paraphrase his stance on Helvetius, writing under the pen name S. G. Tallentyre. She later confirmed it was her own phrasing, not a quotation.
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