There is something monstrous in commands couched in invented and unfamiliar language; an alien master is the worst of all. The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.

A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned ... .

We shall succeed only so far as we continue to undertake “the intolerable labor of thought” — that most distasteful of all our activities.

Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.

Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.