If there is anything in the world a person should fight for, it is freedom to pursue his ideal, because in that is his great opportunity for self-expression, for the unfoldment of the greatest thing possible to him.

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.

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

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.

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

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

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

What light is to the eyes - what air is to the lungs - what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably gracious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

When even one American, who has done nothing wrong, is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.

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 is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

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.

If we all can persevere, if we can in every land and office look beyond our own shores and ambitions, then surely the age will dawn in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

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

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."

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

What we do now echoes in eternity.

If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there.

The higher you soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children.

The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.

Limitations are merely opportunities to grow. I use them as stepping stones to success.

Opportunities are usually disguised by hard work. So most people don’t recognize them.

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn.

By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination.

I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.

The change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

A person with a clear purpose will make progress on even the toughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress on even the smoothest road.

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.

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease to exist at death.

When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It’s very simple.

Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.