The quote database

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Free labour has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.

There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored.

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”

My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

The question is whether a statute authorizing such proceedings in restraint of publication is consistent with the conception of the liberty of the press as historically conceived and guaranteed.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will

To teach, to rule, to make, to decorate, to distribute,—these are not sex-functions: they are race-functions.

The spirit of personal independence in the women of to-day is sure proof that a change has come.

What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.

For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

An armed disciplined body is, in its essence, dangerous to liberty; undisciplined, it is ruinous to society.

To me there was no question so important as the emancipation of women from the dogmas of the past, political, religious, and social.

Emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the truest sense.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

If I have set my admiration on the poor body, I have given myself up to be a slave; if on my poor possessions, I also make myself a slave.

Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression.

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history.

Sometimes we fail to hear or heed these voices of freedom because to us the privilege of our freedom is such an old, old story.

To make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one

Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.

It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.