Henry David Thoreau Quotes

A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.

We learn that Comrade [President of South Africa Nelson] Mandela has announced in a speech that he hopes for a bright future in South Africa for ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’ Anyone who has thought about it realizes that liberty and equality are antithetical concepts. You can have one, or you can have the other, but you certainly cannot have both. As to that, either concept is a rather futile goal. Equality is biologically impossible, and liberty is only obtainable in homogeneous populations very thinly spread.

It was very much a cry for democratic control at that time. Above all, breaking the accomplished power of a few people to rule the lives of everybody else.

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.

The whole American experiment has been predicated on giving individuals as much control over their own lives as possible.

The freedom to be an individual is the essence of America.

The question is whether voters, particularly independents, believe that Obama truly values personal liberty and responsibility as much as the government-bought safety net.

We must be thoroughly democratic and patronize everybody without distinction of class.

Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist…. no one since Thomas Jefferson ... has really believed it.

Here everyone is his own master. Civil liberty places all inhabitants on an equal footing. The humble cannot be oppressed by the mighty, nor the poor by the rich.

Freedom requires civil responsibility.

He [Andrew Jackson] looked after the little fellow who had no pull.

Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.

We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.

We built [socialistic society] for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks.

Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal.

Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.

I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.

Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property.

Scratch an egalitarian, and you will inevitably find a statist.

We get our rights from our Creator as individuals. So every individual should be treated the same way.

We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.

The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.