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

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

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

Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.

They fear love because it creates a world they can't control.

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.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

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

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.

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.

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!

Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.

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

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.

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 only survives when it is defended.

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.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

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

Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man's mind.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

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."

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

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.

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

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.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

Let us remind ourselves that it is ordinary people – men and women, boys and girls – that make the world a special place.

In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates.

I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.

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

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

To play a wrong note is insignificant. To play without passion is inexcusable.

I have to face life with a newly found passion. I must rediscover the irresistible will to learn, to live and to love.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

Pleasure without joy is as hollow as passion without tenderness.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

It never ceases to amaze me: We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when anyone engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall be given a square deal.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… The one absolutely certain way of brining this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

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

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

It was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes…loses its moral rights to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.