If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy? Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us – especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change? Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it’s a subject below their social standing.

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

We think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

The society in ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.

There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

Society is at odds with itself.

Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.

If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

Society has made us believe you should look like an 18-year-old model all your life.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

There are two great forces, God’s force of good and the devil’s force of evil, and I believe Satan is alive and he is working, and he is working harder than ever, and we have many mysteries that we don’t understand.

Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

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

Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

In today’s world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they’re cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

What you’re seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they’re directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good… Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

You notice how liberals keep saying, ‚If only Islam would have a Reformation‘ – it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot.