Called to the throne by the voice of the people, my maxim has always been: A career open to talent without distinction of birth. It is this system of equality for which the European oligarchy detests me
No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible.
Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.
I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.
You cannot have all chiefs; you gotta have Indians too.
Perfect love cannot be without equality.
A friend to everybody and to nobody is the same thing.
We are all alike, on the inside.
The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone's account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.