Racial discrimination is not a permissible solution... that can only weaken the principle of equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Equal Protection Clause.

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, butt in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

If we all can persevere, if we can in every land and office look beyond our own shores and ambitions, then surely the age will dawn in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act. . . . Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of liberty.

When one remains silent in the face of oppression, one is on the side of the oppressor.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly two be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

When even one American, who has done nothing wrong, is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.

'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

Perfect wisdom has four parts; Wisdom, the principle of doing things right. Justice, the principle of doing things equally in public and private. Fortitude, the principle of not fleeing danger, but meeting it. Temperance, the principle of subduing desires and living moderately.

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default; by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.