Listening requires shared time.

A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense to everything.

The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.

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.

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

I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.

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

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.

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

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

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

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

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.

They [the Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

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.

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.

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

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.

They fear love because it creates a world they can't control.

A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.

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.

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

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

We doctors know a hopeless case if—listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door.

When there is silence one finds the anchor of the universe within oneself.

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