Echoes

We have a great dream. It started way back in 1776, and God grant that America will be true to her dream.

This nation has a banner… it is the banner of Dawn. It means Liberty… Every color means liberty; every thread means liberty.

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

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

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

Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men.

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

Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

While I breathe, I hope.

The sun is new each day.

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

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.

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.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

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

The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security is so powerful a principle that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations; though the effect of these obstructions is always more or less either to encroach upon its freedom, or to diminish its security.

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

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

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect or a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

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.

The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.

He who is brave is free.

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.