The quote database

The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion

The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact

neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with the equal protection principle when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature -- equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities

"Inherent differences" between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity.

To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.

Human judgment is never unerring, and is rarely regarded as otherwise than wrong by the unsuccessful party in the contest.

We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.

It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our Nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad.

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Other decent men are so alienated by such conduct that in their turn they abandon all effort to fight for reform, believing reformers to be either hypocrites or fools.

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution.

It is over the lowest class of mankind that government by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect.

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.

Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.

I cannot believe that at this stage in our history, the American people would ever knowingly support purposeless vengeance.

The position of the Negro today in America is the tragic but inevitable consequence of centuries of unequal treatment.

Thus, even as the colonists embarked on a course to secure their own freedom and equality, they ensured perpetuation of the system that deprived a whole race of those rights.

Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.

One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings