Tyranny never escapes freedom.

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.

Freedom exists not to do what you like but to have the right to do what you ought.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

Evil comes from the abuse of free will.

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

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.

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

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

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

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

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!

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.

Liberty only survives when it is defended.

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

A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

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

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

You find out the necessity of Liberty as you find out the necessity of air—by not having enough of it.