He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

I am the freest author in the world.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

Freedom is not enough.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

I have no problem if someone wants to hug me – if I know him!

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government – that is despotism.

Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

My goal is just to be respected as a man when I walk down the street with my family. I don’t care what your job is, you’re not gonna talk down to me, you’re not gonna try to get a rise out of me. I’m a man first. And in establishing that, some interesting things have happened.

Remember, it’s as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Man can never be a woman’s equal in the spirit of selfless service with which nature has endowed her.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

All religions try to benefit people, with the same basic message of the need for love and compassion, for justice and honesty, for contentment.

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Blacks, especially in America, have been raised with a slave mentality – they don’t feel that they have the right to speak as loud as possible.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

So far as I am concerned, I could not be accused of having set eyes, or having wished to set eyes, upon Darius‘ wife: on the contrary, I have refused even to listen to those who spoke to me of her beauty.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic.

The people know their rights, and they are never slow to assert and maintain them when they are invaded.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

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