“Dictators may torture or kill us, but they shall not succeed in demoralizing the soul of our movement, in bringing it to a state where for the sake of saving its life it is willing to renounce its ideal. Our cause will conquer in spite of everything, for in economic life as well as in politics the highest ability to accomplish and to advance things belongs to communities and organizations of free men working in free cooperation. These free communities will far outstrip every collective body, every organization that is built on compulsion and that can be maintained only by brute force; and ultimately the communities based on oppression will perish.”

California Lawyer, “Just Say No,” (April 2001) pp. 52-55

Christianity and Democracy (1943), p. 43.

As quoted in The History of Canada (1970) by Kenneth William Kirkpatrick McNaught, p. 143

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 415

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 5: A Crisis in My Mental History (p. 102)

Commencement Speech Given at Notre Dame University (22 May 1977) http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=727
Presidency (1977–1981)
Context: Democracy’s great recent successes — in India, Portugal, Spain, Greece — show that our confidence in this system is not misplaced. Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed.
For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have now found our way back to our own principles and values, and we have regained our lost confidence. <!-- By the measure of history, our Nation’s 200 years are very brief, and our rise to world eminence is briefer still. It dates from 1945, when Europe and the old international order lay in ruins. Before then, America was largely on the periphery of world affairs. But since then, we have inescapably been at the center of world affairs.

Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time.
1990s, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism (1998)

Message to the international industrial development conference in San Francisco, quoted in The Times (16 October 1957), p. 7

Address to the 1977 Minnesota State AFL-CIO Convention.