If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

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

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

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 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.

They [the Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.

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

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

It is a socialist idea making profits is a vice. I consider the real vice is making losses.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

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.

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