“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”

Great men are almost always bad men.

False principles, which correspond with the bad as well as with the just aspirations of mankind, are a normal and necessary element in the social life of nations.

There are many things the government cant do, many good purposes it must renounce. It must leave them to the enterprise of others. It cannot feed the people. It cannot enrich the people. It cannot teach the people. It cannot convert the people.

Moral precepts are constant through the ages and not obedient to circumstances.

There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.

The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom.

A convinced man differs from a prejudiced man as an honest man from a liar.

I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task.

Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together.

Progress, the religion of those who have none.

Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

For centuries it was never discovered that education was a function of the State, and the State never attempted to educate.

The mills of God grind slowly.

A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved.

Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, 2,460 years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end…liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition…

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.

One who is allowed to sin, sins less

My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go.

Although I myself don’t go to church or synagogue, I do, whether it’s superstition or whatever, pray every time I get on a plane. I just automatically do it. I say the same thing every time.