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.

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them.

O beautiful for spacious skies, For Amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!

For you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you.

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."

Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.

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

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly would if such a right were a vital one.

It is a socialist idea making profits is a vice. I consider the real vice is making losses.

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

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

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act. . . . Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of liberty.

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.

They fear love because it creates a world they can't control.

The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.

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

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.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace, and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

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.

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

Fundamentally, there are only to ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion — the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation — the technique of the marketplace.

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.

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

We have more machinery of government that is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

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

The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

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

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.