“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.”

Those who expect to reap the blessing of freedom must undertake to support it.

Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.

When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind of corruption generates and forms.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.

There are two distinct classes of men – those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes.

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

We repose an unwise confidence in any government, or in any men, when we invest them officially with too much, or an unnecessary quantity of, discretionary power.

It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error.

Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

A nation under a well regulated government, should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.

We should not be flying a flag of a group who wants to erase our history and bring mass destruction to our country through Communism.

There is a great destructive force that comes upon us when we start comparing ourselves in the flesh with what we could be spiritually.

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats.

I think what is needed in India today is the destruction of that defeatist spirit.

But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.

While the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

Remember, weapons of mass destruction don’t mean missiles.