All quotes

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.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government,--that is despotism.

This declared indifference, but, as I must think, real, covert zeal, for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate.

On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.

that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth

the liberty of association is become a necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the majority

On the other hand, in a State where the citizens are nearly on an equality, it becomes difficult for them to preserve their independence against the aggressions of power.

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

Considering standing armies as dangerous to free governments in time of peace, I shall not seek to enlarge our present establishment, nor disregard that salutary lesson of political experience which teaches that the military should be held subordinate to the civil power.

The loss of liberty, of all good government, of peace, plenty, and happiness, must inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union.

The ancient republics absorbed the individual in the state--prescribed his religion and controlled his activity.

The American system rests on the assertion of the equal right of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to freedom of conscience, to the culture and exercise of all his faculties.

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.”

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class,—it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.

A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.

As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in “We, the people.”

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.

We should hold our differing opinions in mutual respect, and, having submitted them to the arbitrament of the ballot, should accept an adverse judgment with the same respect that we would have demanded of our opponents if the decision had been in our favor.

I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

The whole theory of our institutions is based on the liberty and independence of the individual.

The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with offical misconduct.