Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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

Freedom ultimately means the right of the other people to do things you don’t approve of.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

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.

If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Freedom is to be free from restraint and violence from others.

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

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.

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."

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.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to allow his vision wherever it takes him.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

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.

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.

Liberty without Learning is always in peril and Learning without Liberty is always in vain.

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.

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!

Either you will control your government, or government will control you.

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.

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