As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.
The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal – that you can gather votes like box tops – is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.
A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.
Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job.
The relationship of the toastmaster to speaker should be the same as that of the fan to the fan dancer. It should call attention to the subject without making any particular effort to cover it.
The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations – great or small – to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.
I think that one of the most fundamental responsibilities is to give testimony in a court of law, to give it honestly and willingly.
She was the kind of person who would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.
You know, you really can’t beat a household commodity – the ketchup bottle on the kitchen table.
We have confused the free with the free and easy.
The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day.
Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.
Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.
Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.
We must recover the element of quality in our traditional pursuit of equality. We must not, in opening our schools to everyone, confuse the idea that all should have equal chance with the notion that all have equal endowments.
The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty.
The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.