Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

While discipline and freedom seem like they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, they are actually very connected.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

It is natural to die as to be born.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth – then all Americans are in peril.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

I simply can’t build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death… I think… peace and tranquillity will return again.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

I have the space and liberty to create.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

The momentum of freedom in our world is unmistakable – and it is not carried forward by our power alone. We can trust in that greater power Who guides the unfolding of the years. And in all that is to come, we can know that His purposes are just and true.

Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

Too many Christians live their lives like slaves – to the devil – because they believe his lies more than they trust God.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‚I know.‘ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

Freedom is a man’s natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.

The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

You can’t keep your mind on fighting when you’re thinking about a woman. You can’t keep your concentration. You feel like sleeping all the time.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

I have seen how leaders rule by intimidation. Leaders who demonize and dehumanize entire groups of people often do so because they have nothing else to offer. And I have seen how places that stifle the voices and dismiss the potential of their citizens are diminished: how they are less vital, less hopeful, less free.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

Within the soul of America is freedom of mind and spirit in man. Here alone are the open windows through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit. Here alone is human dignity not a dream but an accomplishment. Perhaps it is not perfect, but it is more full in realization here than any other place in the world.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

The United States of America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins. The killers will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

The approach of liberty makes even an old man brave.

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

I don’t have freedom in the United States to go into a public school and preach the Gospel, nor is a student free in a public school to pray, or a teacher free to read the Bible publicly to the students. At the same time, we have a great degree of freedom for which I am grateful.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.