That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.

Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.

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

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

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

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

I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

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.

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

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

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

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

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.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

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.

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.

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.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most impressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be saturated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.

Liberty only survives when it is defended.

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.

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

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.

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

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

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

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."

Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.

When civil fury first grew high, and men fell out they knew not why.

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

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the “common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.

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.