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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.

Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness.

Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.

Great evils are in some cases only to be met by resistance; they cannot be wept down, but must be battled down.

We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.

A false and a childish sorrow is appeased with as false and as childish a revenge.

The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.

Other decent men are so alienated by such conduct that in their turn they abandon all effort to fight for reform, believing reformers to be either hypocrites or fools.

I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement.

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.

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

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.

It is over the lowest class of mankind that government by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect.

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

The enormous expense of governments has provoked people to think, by making them feel; and when once the veil begins to rend, it admits not of repair.

Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.

I cannot believe that at this stage in our history, the American people would ever knowingly support purposeless vengeance.

The position of the Negro today in America is the tragic but inevitable consequence of centuries of unequal treatment.

Thus, even as the colonists embarked on a course to secure their own freedom and equality, they ensured perpetuation of the system that deprived a whole race of those rights.

Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.