“Freedom is the opposite of necessity.”

Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.

The history of nature, begins with good, for it is God’s work; the history of freedom begins with badness, for it is man’s work.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

If the truth shall kill them, let them die.

Experience may teach us what is, but never that it cannot be otherwise.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.

Treat people as an end, and never as a means to an end.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

What might be said of things in themselves, separated from all relationship to our senses, remains for us absolutely unknown.

We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.

For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.

Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.

Give me matter and I will build a world out of it.

The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.

Revolution is an inalienable right of mankind. Freedom is an imperishable birth right of all. Labor is the real sustainer of society, the sovereignty of the ultimate destiny of the workers.

In 1985, I joined my mother in a protest against apartheid in which we were arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. And she was at President-elect Mandela’s side in Johannesburg when he claimed victory in South Africa’s first free elections.

How many must die before we can really have a free and true and peaceful society?

Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.

The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.

When you learn to be alone and not feel lonely, is when you learn to be free.

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what the winds are to oceans and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.