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

All the blood is drained out of democracy – it dies – when only half the population votes.

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

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated on the job.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

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.

Democracy is our commitment. It is our great legacy, a legacy we simply cannot compromise. Democracy is in our DNA.

Look, freedom is an overwhelming American notion. The idea that we want to see the world, the peoples of the world free is something that all of us subscribe to.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

Rebellion is what you make of it. When you’ve been on a tour bus for two months straight, and then you get in your car and drive wherever you want, that can feel rebellious.

Freedom is a man’s natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.

I always have been an activist for things that were just authentically a part of my life, that I felt connected to.

Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom, and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

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.

I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples‘ money.

Only the educated are free.

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.

We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

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

The wisest use of American strength is to advance freedom.

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

When you are spiritually connected, you are not looking for occasions to be offended, and you are not judging and labeling others. You are in a state of grace in which you know you are connected to God and thus free from the effects of anyone or anything external to yourself.

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

The Nation of Islam’s main focus was teaching black pride and self-awareness. Why should we keep trying to force ourselves into white restaurants and schools when white people didn’t want us? Why not clean up our own neighborhoods and schools instead of trying to move out of them and into white people’s neighborhoods?

Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law.

There’s a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you’re self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn’t so easy in a car, and you can’t cover as much ground walking.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

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

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

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.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.

We know what works. Freedom Works. We know what’s right. Freedom is right.

At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes.

If you want to appeal to everyone, you can’t do a world tour and expect black people to show up at every date – when you’re in Australia, when you’re in Dubai, when you’re in Indonesia.

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

The conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time – 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning. They didn’t have toilets in the fields; they didn’t have cold drinking water. They didn’t have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.