The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Young man, the secret of my success is that at early age I discovered that I was not God.
Every idea is an incitement... eloquence may set fire to reason.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
