Religion is the idol of the mob it adores everything it does not understand.

Without a struggle, there can be no progress.

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July I answer A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. . . .If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.

A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.

It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one’s audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to opress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

All women should know how to take care of children. Most of them will have a husband some day.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance or a stranger.

Perhaps the angels who fear to tread where fools rush in used to be fools who rushed in.

Love doesn’t make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.

Perhaps nothing has changed in the course of history as much as historians.