The quote database

The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.

Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.

Bad local government is certainly a great evil, which ought to be prevented; but to violate the freedom and sanctities of the suffrage is more than an evil.

There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.

Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires.

The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin.

Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

Surely the State has no right to cleanse public debate to the point where it is grammatically palatable to the most squeamish among us.

it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric

Any broader view of this authority would effectively empower a majority to silence dissidents simply as a matter of personal predilections.

All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

Only an unmitigated despotism demands that the individual citizen shall obey unconditionally every mandate of persons in authority.

The interest of the people is that there should be full liberty of censure on every public officer, and on every public act or measure.

A Sultan's favourite slave has slaves under her, over whom she tyrannizes; but the desirable thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave.

it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

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

the right to be let alone--the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men

If you want liberty you yourselves must strike the blow. If you must be free you must become so through your own effort, through your own initiative.

The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs.

Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long in freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.

Why do they expect virtue from a slave, or from a being whom the constitution of civil society has rendered weak, if not vicious?

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves

Such persons should recollect that without law there can be no real practical liberty; that when law is trampled under foot tyranny rules, whether it appears in the form of a military despotism or of popular violence.