“History teaches that, when powerful despots can gain something through aggression, they try, by the same methods, to gain more and more and more.”

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed – else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.

Neither a wise nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.

Those who take the extreme positions in American political and economic life are always wrong.

Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

We are ready in short, to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking, is freedom.

Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

Pull the string and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or timid.

Through knowledge and understanding, we will drive from the temple of freedom all those who seek to establish over us thought control, whether they be agents of a foreign state or demagogues thirsty for personal power and public notice.

We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.

From men motivated by moral certitude, history teaches, no lasting good ever comes.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

In many ways, history is marked as ‘before’ and ‘after’ Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or timid.

For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.

The history of free men is never written by chance but by choice – their choice.