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.

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

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

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

Either you will control your government, or government will control you.

Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly would if such a right were a vital one.

I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

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

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

Never cross a man, not afraid to die.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. Men are no superior by reason of the accidents of race and color. The are superior who have the best heart—the best brain.

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.

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!

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

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

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.

Let us remind ourselves that it is ordinary people – men and women, boys and girls – that make the world a special place.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.