Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.
What's shaking, chiefy baby?
We must dissent from the fear.
What is the quality of your intent?
Truth is more than a mental exercise.
Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.
Do what you think is right and let the law catch up.
[T]he Constitution was a product of its times. [Progressive]
Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place.
To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.
None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.
Customary greeting to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, What's shaking, chiefy baby?
I'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.
In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.
The Ku Klux Klan never dies. They just stop wearing sheets because sheets cost too much.
The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.
Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process.
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals. Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.
Our Constitution is the envy of the world, as it should be for it is the grand design of the finest nation on earth.
[It is] a historic step toward eliminating the shameful practice of racial discrimination in the selection of juries.
A man can make what he wants of himself if he truly believes that he must be ready for hard work and many heartbreaks.
Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.
Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.
History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.
The First Amendment serves not only the needs of the polity but also those of the human spirit - a spirit that demands self-expression .
It was taken for granted that we had to make something of ourselves. Not much was said about it; it was just in the atmosphere of the home.
Deciding not to decide is, of course, among the most important things done by the Supreme Court. It takes a lot of doing, but it can be done.
Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.
Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.
We can always stick together when we are losing, but tend to find means of breaking up when we're winning. In Grace under Pressure, by Hastie, 1984.
The ban directly hampers the partys ability to spread its message and hamstrings voters seeking to inform themselves about the candidates and issues.
Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.
My father had a flat rule. He believed that every man's house was his castle. He had a flat rule: no man could come in his house without his permission.
Some years ago I said in an opinion that if this country is a melting pot, then either the Afro-Americans didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.
The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.
As soon as I reach any town, I talk to the shoe-shine boys or the barbers or the people in the restaurants, because it's Mr. Joe Doakes who is very close to reality.
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.
The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society.
Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.
Nothing can be more notorious than the calumnies and invectives with which the wisest measures and most virtuous characters of The United States have been pursued and traduced [By American Newspapers]
This is a great country, but fortunately for you, it is not perfect. There is much to be done to bring about complete equality. Remove hunger. Bring reality closer to theory and democratic principles.
None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots.
The death penalty is no more effective a deterrent than life imprisonment... It is also evident that the burden of capital punishment falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the underprivileged members of society.
It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas. ... This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, ... is fundamental to our free society.
A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.
It is important that the strongest pressures against the continuation of segregation, North or South, be continually and constantly manifested. Probably, as much as anything else, this is the key in the elimination of discrimination in the United States.
When you hear a lot of stories about Africa, and you get to a place like Kenya and other countries like that, where they think the same way we do, I was happy to find that the Schedule of Rights that I drew for the Kenyan Government was working very well.
I cannot accept this invitation [to celebrate the bicentenial of the Constitution], for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia Convention... To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start. [Progressive]
We could get more action in the South because the Negroes had a feeling that they were being oppressed. But you take New York, for example: they'd give Negroes little five-cent jobs here and there - and they thought they had something. And the same in Chicago and any of the metropolitan areas.
