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.

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

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

We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Our task must be to free ourselves…by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… The one absolutely certain way of brining this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.

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.

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

Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction.

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.

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

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

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

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act. . . . Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of liberty.

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

In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates.

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.

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

Why has government been instituted? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason & justice without constraint.