The Quotes canon

Sourced and curated.

Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
43 quotes
SortEditorial Year Length
Topic·Equality✕clear
Film · War (film) · Epic (film) · War · Epic

This is a different kind of army. If you look back through history you will see men fighting for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, power, because a king leads them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. This has not happened much in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free. America should be free ground, all of it, not divided by a line between slave state and free. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow, no man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here is the place to build a home. But it's not the land. There's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me. What we're fighting for, in the end, you're fighting for each other.

★ 3.5
Political literature

What I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master's man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all-the realization at last of the meaning of the word commonwealth.

★ 5.1
Speech · Political speech

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

★ 5.1
Show 3 more of 43 (41–43)