“Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.”

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.

Life has its pains and evils-its bitter disappointments; but like a good novel and in healthful length of days, there is infinite joy in seeing the World, the most interesting of continued stories, unfold.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody’s slavery.

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, – this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.

We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong – this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.

The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.

The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.

Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.

But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.

Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.

The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this – with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need – this life is hell.

Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution . .

I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.

If we steal a man’s purse we are thieves. If we steal twelve hundred islands we are patriots. If you steal a man’s money you will be sent to the penitentiary. If you steal his liberty you will be sent to the White House.

The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

Love is our greatest liberation.

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.

The liberty of thinking and publishing whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrances, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountainhead and origin of many evils.