“To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.

All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.

The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn’t it only the naive who find all of this baffling?

Accept certain inalienable truths.

I also had a mistaken attitude towards certain comrades.

There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.

We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image.

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.

You have a movie and it proves itself and then certain things happen.

What was the opposite of linkage blindness? What described being certain of something without any kind of evidence?…The term was faith.