The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for.

No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is simple. You knock a man down and then have him arrested for assault. You kill a man and then hang the corpse.

Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma.

Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.

For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.