There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.

You cannot possibly have a broader basis for any government than that which includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights.

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.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

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.

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

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in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to allow his vision wherever it takes him.

Liberty only survives when it is defended.

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.

Racial discrimination is not a permissible solution... that can only weaken the principle of equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Equal Protection Clause.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.

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.

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

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.

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."

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defence.