Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.

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

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.

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

Freedom ultimately means the right of the other people to do things you don’t approve of.

Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.

Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely enjoy exercising authority usually lose it.

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

It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly two be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

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.

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in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

They fear love because it creates a world they can't control.

If we are to achieve richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary rule of another man.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. . . . I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.

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.

One man thinks himself the master of others but remains more of a slave than they are.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.