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.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he be free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family.

Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

I think there’s more women that watch me than men, but I don’t look at myself as just a minister to women. My ministry began that way, but I really feel like the Word of God is for everybody.

Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.

The American people are so much stronger, so much more resolved than any enemy can fully understand.

Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

I’m tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro – that’s the Scotch-Irish part.

My mother came from India to go to the University of California, Berkeley.

What pity is it That we can die, but once to serve our country.

Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

It’s like the Wild West, the Internet. There are no rules.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

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.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

A revolution is not a bed of roses.

The army is the true nobility of our country.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we’ve got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

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

If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

To like an individual because he’s black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn’t white.

I love diversity.

I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God’s eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews – everybody is created equally in the eyes of God.

The diversity of India, of our civilization, is actually a thing of beauty, which is something we are extremely proud of.

If you don’t know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

I think, in politics, half the people are gonna like you, and half the people are not gonna like you, no matter what you do or what you say… It’s like there are no right answers. If there were, everyone would choose the right answers. They’re all opinions.

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

The uniform makes for brotherhood, since when universally adopted it covers up all differences of class and country.

We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights.

Our goal in the ’70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

The only certain freedom’s in departure.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

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

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.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Homeland or death! Socialism or death! We shall overcome!

I will meet my countrymen. I understand only one language: that they are my countrymen, they are my brothers. You may see with whatever colour you want; Modi will not go into that colour.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

Here at home, when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again, and rekindle an American spirit of community.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You’re not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.