Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.

Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.

Whether history will judge this war to be different or not we cannot say. But this we can say with certainty: A government and a society that silences those who dissent is one that has lost its way.

In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.

Its awfully hard to be the son of a great man and also of a half-crazy woman.

The American people...have a stake in non-conformity. For they know that the American genius is non-conformist.