“In every age its (liberty’s) progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food”

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities.

Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.

Democracy generally monopolizes and concentrates power.

Socialism means slavery.

The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.

Every class is unfit to govern.

If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh.

If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power…power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being.

Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.

Piety sometimes gives birth to scruples, and faith to superstition, when they are not directed by wisdom and knowledge.

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous.

The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable of.

Punishment [by Nero] was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.

Dissolving the dross which had ‘encrusted’ Christianity ‘in the days of ignorance and superstition’.

Such crimes has superstition caused.

Laws should be made, not against quacks but against superstition.

Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.

If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science they are mere superstitions and imaginations.