The quote database

The love of protecting too often degenerates into downright tyranny.

Poverty and ignorance are the parents of intemperance, and that vice will never be suppressed until the burdens of life are equally shared by all.

The breakfast was eaten in silence, the women humbled with a sense of their helplessness, and the men gratified with a sense of their power.

The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

Do not admire your clothes, and then you will not be angry with the thief.

No man can rob us of our Will--no man can lord it over that!

When legislation touches freedom of thought and freedom of speech, such a tendency is a formidable enemy of the free spirit.

Nevertheless the person in charge never seems to look the impossibility in the face.

Such exclusion goes over 'the very brink of constitutional power' and falls into the ugly abyss of racism.

Good citizens may well claim the protection of good laws and the benign influence of good government, but a claim for office is what the people of a republic should never recognize.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man

My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.

The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work.

To make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one

The absolute power of this distant old master had touched my young spirit with but the point of its cold, cruel iron, and left me something to brood over after the play and in moments of repose.

Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families.

To enslave men successfully and safely it is necessary to keep their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived.

The plea for this outrage was then, as it is always, the tyrant's plea of necessity.

In place of the suspicious watchfulness and the more or less open warfare which characterizes the ordinary types of management, there is universally friendly cooperation between the management and the men.

Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos.

The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.

Under our scheme of government the waste of public money is a crime against the citizen, and the contempt of our people for economy and frugality in their personal affairs deplorably saps the strength and sturdiness of our national character.