Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within solitude of his own heart.

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

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.

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

They [the Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

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.

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

I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. Men are no superior by reason of the accidents of race and color. The are superior who have the best heart—the best brain.

Freedom exists not to do what you like but to have the right to do what you ought.

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him, except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

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

We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

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.

The overwhelming importance of the atmosphere means that there are no longer any frontiers to defend against pollution, attack, or propaganda. It means, further, that only by a deep patriotic devotion to one’s country can there be a hope of the kind of protection of the whole planet, which is necessary for the survival of the people of other countries.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.

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

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.

In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

You don't need another person, place or thing to make you whole. God already did that. Your job is to know it.

A friend is as it were a second self.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.

One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right when the head is totally wrong.

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively.

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.

There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.