None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe the are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their inner minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.

You must try to observe yourself more and more objectively, to look at everything in yourself as though another person.

All that is important in this moment is movement. Make the movement vital and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.

The clearest way in the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it.

A problem well-put is half-solved.

You write in order to change the world…the world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimetre the way people look at reality, then you change it.

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so act toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.

Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown.

Your body is precious. It is our vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.

Ignorance never settle a question.

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

Some people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.

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

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

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

Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.

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.

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.

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.

Free choice is the greatest gift God gives to his children.

No man on earth is truly free. All are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.

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.

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.

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

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.

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

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.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

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."

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.

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.

The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants.

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

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

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

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

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

We have more machinery of government that is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.

Those who would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles in the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

I propose to raise a revolution against the lie that the majority has the monopoly of the truth.

What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Everything you say should be true but not everything true should be said.

If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule: never lie to yourself.

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.

There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.

To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.