“If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.”

The minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism.

In every age its 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.

Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.

Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.

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.

But when the dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.

Lincoln was the spokesman of the rising capitalist class of the North, who viewed the emancipation of Negro slaves as indispensable to the development and triumph of the manufacturers and bankers of the industrial North, East and West over the slave-holder of the South.

For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.

It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That’s where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts.

The Emancipation Proclamation…can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree