A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

Madness does not govern a country; discussion does.

When elephants fight, ants get killed.

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.

The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.

Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.

The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.

Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

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.

The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a life.

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

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.

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

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.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new.

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.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

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

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”