The ability to exchange opposing ideas is freedom in action.

The question, 'Who ought to be boss?' is like asking 'Who ought to be the tenor in a quartet?' Obviously, the man who can sing tenor.

Patience is not simply the ability to wait – it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.

To be granted some kind of usable talent and to be able to use it to the fullest extent of which you are capable—this, to me, is a kind of joy that is almost unequaled.

The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.

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

Gentleness is strength under control. It is the ability to stay calm, no matter what happens.

Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.

You don’t have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production.

Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.

I’m an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on my way.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The overwhelming importance of the atmosphere means that there are no longer any frontiers to defend against pollution, attack, or propaganda. It means, further, that only by a deep patriotic devotion to one’s country can there be a hope of the kind of protection of the whole planet, which is necessary for the survival of the people of other countries.

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.

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.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

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

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.

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.

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

True success, true wealth, does not come out of the barrel of a gun.

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

When one remains silent in the face of oppression, one is on the side of the oppressor.

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

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.

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.

For friendship, like freedom, must be tended.

Freedom of information is a fundamental human right...for a nation that is afraid to let its people to judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

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

If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences.

Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.

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.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.