“Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man’s origin, capacity and responsibility.”

Men have always been obliged to fight to preserve liberty. Constitutions and laws do not safeguard liberty. It can be preserved only by a tolerant people, and this means eternal conflict.

None meet life honestly and few heroically.

I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

You can only be free if I am free.

For to know all is to understand all, and this leaves no room for judgment and condemnation.

Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.

The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.

No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.

We’re all killers at heart, I have never taken anybody’s life, but I have often read obituary notices with considerable satisfaction.

Everybody is a potential murderer. I’ve never killed anyone, but I frequently get satisfaction reading the obituary notices.

No nation can be really great that is held together by Gatling guns, and no true loyalty can be induced and kept through fear.

It’s not bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel- he believes in punishment.

I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.

The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.

You can’t get to a pleasant place to be at unless you use pleasant methods to get there. When you are dealing with a human society the means is fully as important as the end.

I resolved to claim for my sex all that an impartial Creator had bestowed, which, by custom and a perverted application of the Scriptures, had been wrested from woman.

I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.

A deep meaning often lies in old customs.

Strange customs do not thrive in foreign soil.

All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.

I just wish this social institution [religion] wasnt based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isnt true.

The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.