As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. All change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind.

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.