Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.

Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.

Power must never be trusted without a check.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given, freedom is something people take.

The makers of our Constitution sought to protect Americans.... They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone--the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many, and various, and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.

Neutral men are the devil's allies.

An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

They who have reasoned ignorantly, or who have aimed at effecting their personal ends by flattering the popular feeling, have boldly affirmed that "one man is as good as another"; a maxim that is true in neither nature, revealed morals, or political theory.

War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace.

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

To think is to differ.

Today's Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress honored by tradition, is also revolution.

If there is no struggle there is no progress.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.

I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of man.

The government has ceased to function...the corporations are the government.

The American press, with a very few exceptions, is a kept press. Kept by the big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man.

Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of knowledge.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

We seek victory--not over any nation or people--but over ignorance, poverty, disease, and human degradation wherever they may be found.

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

To criticize one's country is to do it a service.... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism--a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.

Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.

Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, whether by withdrawl from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.

The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.

Right knows no boundaries and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.

...all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

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

We are in danger of developing a cult of the Common Man, which means a cult of mediocrity.

I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.

The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining...and unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is their natural manure.

I sincerely believe that the banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling on a large scale.

There is no truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.

When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself public property.

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

To be a revolutionary is to love your life enough to change it, to choose struggle instead of exile, to risk everything with only the glimmering hope of a world to win.

Let no man think that we can deny civil liberties to others and retain it for ourselves.... When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected 'radicals' without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail...we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity as a shield to every American citizen.

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

If Fascism comes to America it would be on a program of Americanism.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

We hold these truths to be Self evident; that all Men are created equal and independent; that from that equal Creation they derive Rights inherent and unalienable; among which are the Preservation of Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that to Secure these ends, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the Governed; that whenver, any form of Government, Shall becomne destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government....

The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.

That government is best which governs least.

Write on my gravestone, "Infidel, Traitor"--infidel to every church that compromises with the strong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.

...always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice and corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news; always be drastically independent; never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face...You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

All restraints upon man's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.

The state, it cannot be too often repeated, does nothing and can give nothing which it does not take from somebody.

Every Republican candidate for President since 1936 has been nominated by the Chase National Bank.

There can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.

Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost; and not until we live in a society where each can exercise hs right of sovereignty at all times without clashing with or violating that of others.

The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army... We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.

An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.

Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin.

Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance.

The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of their bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as it exists, our old variety of freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question.

The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.

Truth against the world.

We want men to rule the nation who care more for and love better the nation's welfare than gold and silver, fame or popularity.