All quotes

Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.

The law, whether human or divine, is no respecter of persons; but the law is a respecter of reality.

Your every voter, as surely as your Chief Magistrate, under the same high sanction, though in a different sphere, exercises a public trust.

Our mission is not punishment, but the rectification of wrong.

Under our scheme of government the waste of public money is a crime against the citizen, and the contempt of our people for economy and frugality in their personal affairs deplorably saps the strength and sturdiness of our national character.

The Constitution expresses more than the conviction of the people that democratic processes must be preserved at all costs.

Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.

I would ten thousand times rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America

Reader, it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am telling you truthfully what I suffered in slavery.

depriving individuals of the right to choose for themselves how to conduct their intimate relationships poses a far greater threat to the values most deeply rooted in our Nation's history than tolerance of nonconformity could ever do

Their life seems an immense disparity between effort and opportunity.

If citizens do not like a law, their duty as honest men and women is to discourage its violation; their right is openly to work for its repeal.

The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect for all law.

any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him

Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell

The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.

The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.

The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press

It is a well-established principle of law that every wrong has a remedy.

The evil cannot be cured or remedied by silence as to its existence.

The press and even the pulpit, in the main either by silence or open apology, have condoned and encouraged this state of anarchy.

Bad local government is certainly a great evil, which ought to be prevented; but to violate the freedom and sanctities of the suffrage is more than an evil.

Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.

There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.