You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

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

The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance.

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

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.

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.

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.

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

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.

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

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.

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

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.

The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.

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

Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin; steal from a thief, for that is easy; lay a trap for a trickster and catch him at first attempt, but beware of an honest man.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies’ plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.