You can’t put democracy and freedom back into a box.

Fortunately we’re not a public company – we’re a private group of companies, and I can do what I want.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

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.

I think everyone should be with who they love.

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‚Ich bin ein Berliner!‘

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

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

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

In the 21st century, the countries that thrive will be the ones where citizens know their voices will be heard because the institutions are transparent.

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

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

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

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

India is a democracy; it is in our DNA.

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

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.

It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda. We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

I’ve used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I’ve still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

DACA recipients risk a lot to come out of the shadows & sign up, but many will tell you the risk is worth being able to live and work in the only country they’ve ever known as home. DACA recipients serve in our military, work in Fortune 100 companies, and conduct important medical research.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

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.

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.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

People have more freedom to bring more of their personal qualities into the role they play once they have established themselves and their competence is no longer in question. But this is always within limits.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It’s not like Egypt, where you’re going to get murdered by the security forces.

I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.

I think it’s important to vote.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Black people in America, people from the struggle, immigrants, it’s no generational wealth that we are attached to, so we are tasked to create – in one generation – closing the gap. That’s why we so Doomsday about getting to the check: ‚cause it’s life or death for real.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

The New Deal repudiation of democracy has left the Republican Party alone the guardian of the Ark of the Covenant with its charter of freedom.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: ‚This is my country.‘

I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God’s creation, woman, the object of our lust.

We don’t believe in planners and deciders making the decisions on behalf of Americans.

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

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.