All quotes

The concepts of "majority" and "minority" necessarily reflect temporary arrangements and political judgments.

The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.

The observed worker should be made to realize the purpose and importance of the measurement.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.

If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

The confirmed criminal is as much entitled to redress as his most virtuous fellow citizen; no record of crime, however long, makes one an outlaw.

They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone

The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs.

And yet, in spite of the opposition encountered, and the obstacles opposed to their acquisition of knowledge and their accumulation of property, the progress made by colored women along these lines has never been surpassed by that of any people in the history of the world.

Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves

The many have always been enthralled by the few; and, monsters who have scarcely shown any discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow creatures.

Why do they expect virtue from a slave, or from a being whom the constitution of civil society has rendered weak, if not vicious?

Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other, arising from their necessary and unavoidable relations; which rights and duties there is no common human authority to protect and enforce.

Such persons should recollect that without law there can be no real practical liberty; that when law is trampled under foot tyranny rules, whether it appears in the form of a military despotism or of popular violence.

The great law of morality ought to have a national as well as a personal and individual application.

The law is the only sure protection of the weak and the only efficient restraint upon the strong.

Wherefore the nature of a multitude is no more to be blamed than the nature of princes, since both equally err when they can do so without regard to consequences.

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.

For equal work equally well performed by a man and by a woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall receive a less recompense.

Give us labour and the training which fits for labour! We demand this, not for ourselves alone, but for the race.

That even one individual in a society should be debarred from undertaking that form of social toil for which it is most fitted, makes an unnecessary deficit in the general social assets.

We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less.

We make this demand, not for our own sakes alone, but for the succour of the race.