We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities between one extreme and another.

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire.

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

We can’t allow the world’s worst leaders to blackmail, threaten, hold freedom-loving nations hostage with the world’s worst weapons.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

I try to make it look easy, but the behind-the-scenes stuff is the challenge.

The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin‘ hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.

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

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

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

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

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.

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

Desire of having is the sin of covetousness.

We are a nation founded as a rebuke to tyranny. A nation of revolutionaries who refused sovereign reign from afar. Hear me – we’re a nation that says give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. A nation built on our differences, guided by the belief that we’re all created equal.

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.

It’s certainly not wrong to want to be a better person. God gave us that desire.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

The wisest use of American strength is to advance freedom.

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.

We humans for millions of years were nomadic. We associated freedom and well-being with the ability to move into open spaces, to find places more suited to hunting.

At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift.

The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom – and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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.

Prejudice is a chain, it can hold you. If you prejudice, you can’t move, you keep prejudice for years. Never get nowhere with that.

The Israelites‘ slavery in Egypt is the equivalent of our slavery to sin. God sent Moses to deliver them from bondage, and He sent Jesus Christ to set us free.

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.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

I always wanted more – more of everything.

Freedom does not die from frontal attack. It dies because men in power no longer believe in a system based upon liberty.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

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.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

I struggled with being a broke college graduate, and while all my friends were getting career jobs, I was working horrible part-time jobs. That’s why now, even when I get tired, I think, ‚This is what I asked for.‘

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

Empire and liberty.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.