Everyone has an influence on public affairs if he will take the trouble to exert it.

No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward a time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient than those of our Revolutionary ancestors.

Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.

Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.

We have too much legislating by clamor, by tumult, by pressure. Representative government ceases when outside influence of any kind is substituted for the judgment of the representative.

Surprisingly few men are lacking in capacity, but they fail because... they are too indolent to apply themselves with the seriousness and the attention that is necessary to solve important problems.

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.