The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance.

If you make peaceful revolution impossible you make violent revolution inevitable

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.

Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man's life.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is no fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.

If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.

Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.

Democracy is...the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

He who talks more is sooner exhausted.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.

If given the choice between Righteousness and Peace, I choose Righteousness.

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.

We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.

It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.