The quote database

Every corps is a chain of despots, who, submitting and tyrannizing without exercising their reason, become dead weights of vice and folly on the community.

Do not fall into the entitlement trap of feeling you are a victim, you are not. Get over it and get on with it.

One thing you can depend on people being…is people.

Your heart is wounded with compassion to hear the mourning of friends, and, perhaps with anger, to hear the counterfeit condolings of pretenders.

The law is the only sure protection of the weak and the only efficient restraint upon the strong.

Such persons should recollect that without law there can be no real practical liberty; that when law is trampled under foot tyranny rules, whether it appears in the form of a military despotism or of popular violence.

Wherefore the nature of a multitude is no more to be blamed than the nature of princes, since both equally err when they can do so without regard to consequences.

this vice of ingratitude has its source either in avarice or in suspicion

injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer

For equal work equally well performed by a man and by a woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall receive a less recompense.

That even one individual in a society should be debarred from undertaking that form of social toil for which it is most fitted, makes an unnecessary deficit in the general social assets.

a Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire

This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain.

The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.

It is better therefore to listen patiently to a friend's rebuke, for if he should afterwards do wrong himself and so need rebuke, he has set you the example of freedom of speech.

freedom in speech is friendly and has weight, but reproach is selfish and little

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another--until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.

Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact

Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.