"One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying."
— St. Joan of Arc

"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
— Fourteenth Amendment (Section 1), United States Constitution

"Thus, we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."
— Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)

"The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution. By a limited Constitution, I understand one which contains certain specified exceptions to the legislative authority .... Limitations of this kind can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing."
— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers No. 78

"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
— Edward R. Murrow

"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it."
— Abraham Lincoln

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."
— Abraham Lincoln

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
— Abraham Lincoln

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."
— Abraham Lincoln

"There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public."
— Philip K. Dick

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
— Abraham Lincoln

"...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
— Abraham Lincoln

"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
— Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it"
— Rev. Martin Luther King . Jr.

"What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?"
— Abraham Lincoln

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
— Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
— Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"
— Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
— Rev.Martin Luther King Jr.

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."
— William Edgar Borah

"When her last child is off to school, we don't want the talented woman wasting her time in work far below her capacity. We want her to come out running.
"
— Mary Ingraham Bunting

"Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less."
— Susan B. Anthony

"Great necessities call out great virtues."
— Abigail Adams

"The soul should always stand ajar. Ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."
— Emily Dickinson

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
— Pres. Dwight David Eisenhower

"These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed."
— Abigail Adams

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
— Benjamin Franklin

"If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other."
— Carl Shurz

"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free."
— Clarence Darrow

"The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government."
— Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."
— Frederick Douglass

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
— Henry David Thoreau

"The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity."
— John Dewey

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
— John F. Kennedy

"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain."
— John F. Kennedy

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
— John Philpot Curran

"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America."
— Molly Ivins

"If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all."
— Norm Chomsky

"None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free."
— Pearl S. Buck

"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too."
— Somerset Maugham

"Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element."
— Rosa Luxemburg

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
— Wendell Phillips

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
— William O. Douglas

"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."
— William Faulkner

"We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights."
— Felix Frankfurter

"Who speaks of liberty while the human mind is in chains?"
— Francis Wright

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
— James Madison

"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves."
— D.H. Lawrence

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
— Louis D. Brandeis

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
— George Bernard Shaw