History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.

Liberty is the prevention of control by others.

Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. ~ Every class is unfit to govern ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.

The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom.

Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned,-the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.