The quote database

Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.

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

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

They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone

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.

To me, a man has no master but God. Man in his authority is a sovereign lord.

The fact is that old age is respectable just as long as it asserts itself, maintains its proper rights, and is not enslaved to any one.

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.

As members of the minority party, we do not have the primary authority to formulate the policy of our government. But we do have the responsibility of rendering constructive criticism, of clarifying issues, of allaying fears by acting as responsible citizens.

The fundamental principle of scientific pedagogy must be, indeed, the liberty of the pupil;--such liberty as shall permit a development of individual, spontaneous manifestations of the child's nature.

Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.

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

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.

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.

Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other, arising from their necessary and unavoidable relations; which rights and duties there is no common human authority to protect and enforce.

Free trade in labour and equality of training, intellectual or physical, is essential if the organic aptitudes of a sex or class are to be determined.

the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market

Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.

nature makes us free and unrestrained, but we bind and confine immure and force ourselves into small and scanty space

It is the function of religion not to destroy our nature but to fulfil it.

We gain our freedom when we attain our truest nature.

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.

Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.