The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

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.

For friendship, like freedom, must be tended.

True success, true wealth, does not come out of the barrel of a gun.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within solitude of his own heart.

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

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.

Fundamentally, there are only to ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion — the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation — the technique of the marketplace.

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

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

It never ceases to amaze me: We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

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

My own art is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside all rules and demands of society.

You don't have to be big or well known to be great.

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.

Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it. All that is not a true change will disappear in the future society.

...the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be...The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes…loses its moral rights to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with.

Listen with ears of tolerance, see through the eyes of compassion, speak with language of love.

Think lovingly, speak lovingly, act lovingly, and every need shall be supplied.

Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

Teach your child to hold his tongue; he'll learn fast enough to speak.

Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man's mind.

Man's tongue is soft, and bone doth lack; yet a stroke therewith may break a man's back.