Echoes

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted. (11 May 1943)

Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called 'the greatest evil in the world.' The friction which results from ignorance ... can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent.

Every Israelite has a duty to study whether he is poor or rich, whether healthy or suffering, whether young or very old and in failing strength, even if he is poor and supported by charity or begs from door to door.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

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

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

He who is brave is free.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, They may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.

Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds… to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.

Our country—this great republic—means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving.