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.

The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.

Some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.

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

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

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

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

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

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

Liberty only survives when it is defended.

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

I rebel; therefore I exist.

No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him, except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

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.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

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.

Never cross a man, not afraid to die.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

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

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.

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.

I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.