Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.

What I wanted was to be allowed to do the thing in the world that I did best, which I believed then and believe now, is the greatest privilege there is. When I did that, success found me.

Wherever there is injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

Why has government been instituted? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason & justice without constraint.

True success, true wealth, does not come out of the barrel of a gun.

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

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.

As I walked out the door to my freedom I knew that, if I did not leave all the anger, hatred and resentment behind, I would remain a prisoner.

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

If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly would if such a right were a vital one.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

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!

You cannot possibly have a broader basis for any government than that which includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights.

I shall work for the Republican party and call on all women to join me, precisely…for what that party has done and promises to do for women, nothing more, nothing less.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: "This is my country."

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you straight is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary rule of another man.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.

What light is to the eyes - what air is to the lungs - what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace, and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

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.

I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.

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.