Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other.

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind's last chance between chaos and community.

Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

Racial discrimination is not a permissible solution... that can only weaken the principle of equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Equal Protection Clause.

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.

The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.

I could not understand how any man could be so brutalized as to claim the right to dispose of the lives of others, nor how any man could be so lacking in self-esteem as to grant to others the right to dispose of his life.

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

Evil comes from the abuse of free will.

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.

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, butt in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed.

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

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

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: "This is my country."

It is a socialist idea making profits is a vice. I consider the real vice is making losses.

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.

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.

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.

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

Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new.

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.