The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

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.

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

Wherever there is injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion.

Evil comes from the abuse of free will.

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.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

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.

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.

Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.

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.

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."

Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man's mind.

You find out the necessity of Liberty as you find out the necessity of air—by not having enough of it.

The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants.

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.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most impressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be saturated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

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.

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.