Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.

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.

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.

I could not understand how any man could be so brutalized as to claim the right to dispose of the lives of others, nor how any man could be so lacking in self-esteem as to grant to others the right to dispose of his life.

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.

Evil comes from the abuse of free will.

To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.

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.

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

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

Liberty only survives when it is defended.

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself—and be lenient to everybody else.

Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.

Champions take responsibility. When the ball is coming over the net, you can be sure I want the ball.

We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are—that is a fact.

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it continues the true source of national vigor and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.

It is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given, and not to waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices.

I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.

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.

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely enjoy exercising authority usually lose it.

Next to the assumption of power is the responsibility of relinquishing it.

I never encounter anything except my responsibility.

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