All quotes

If you want liberty you yourselves must strike the blow. If you must be free you must become so through your own effort, through your own initiative.

The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs.

Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful

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.

The many have always been enthralled by the few; and, monsters who have scarcely shown any discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow creatures.

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

Do not fall into the entitlement trap of feeling you are a victim, you are not. Get over it and get on with it.

One thing you can depend on people being…is people.

Your heart is wounded with compassion to hear the mourning of friends, and, perhaps with anger, to hear the counterfeit condolings of pretenders.

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.

The law is the only sure protection of the weak and the only efficient restraint upon the strong.

Wherefore the nature of a multitude is no more to be blamed than the nature of princes, since both equally err when they can do so without regard to consequences.

this vice of ingratitude has its source either in avarice or in suspicion

injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer

For equal work equally well performed by a man and by a woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall receive a less recompense.

That even one individual in a society should be debarred from undertaking that form of social toil for which it is most fitted, makes an unnecessary deficit in the general social assets.

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

This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain.

a Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire

freedom in speech is friendly and has weight, but reproach is selfish and little

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another--until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.

The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.