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

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

You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.

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.

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

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.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or good or joy worth having.

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 had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.

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

It does not take a majority of prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.

It was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.

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

The overwhelming importance of the atmosphere means that there are no longer any frontiers to defend against pollution, attack, or propaganda. It means, further, that only by a deep patriotic devotion to one’s country can there be a hope of the kind of protection of the whole planet, which is necessary for the survival of the people of other countries.

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

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defence.

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

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you straight is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.

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!

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

What is a man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, everything in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaring evident which everybody had decided not to see.

A problem well-put is half-solved.

One beautiful heart is better than a thousand beautiful faces.

The more I study science the more I believe in God.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

On some preference esteem is based; to esteem everything is to esteem nothing.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and . . . each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.