Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.
If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.
Nobody's free until everybody's free.
We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we will always be free.
There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right in America.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
Time is the only thing you can't buy.
It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
[Our Constitution] is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of America's resolve.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people... it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.
Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
What does it mean to be an American? While each of us may have our own specific answer to that question, we likely can agree on the basic principles of America: freedom, equal opportunity, and rights accompanied by responsibilities.
It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.
In America, freedom and justice have always come from the ballot box, the jury box, and when that fails, the cartridge box.
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