The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

It does not take a majority of prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.

If you want to conquer fear, don't sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even dearth is one of the things that Nature wills.

There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits.

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.

If you listen to your fears, you will die never knowing what a great person you might have been.

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.

Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.

Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and knowledge are not infused into us from without.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

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 signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to believe in the goodness of people.

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.

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

Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?

Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within solitude of his own heart.

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.