76
The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting its government.
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Attribution
77
The enormous expense of governments has provoked people to think, by making them feel; and when once the veil begins to rend, it admits not of repair.
78
Marshall's statement cannot be read to mean in any sense that a President is above the law
79
If parties in a republic are necessary to secure a degree of vigilance sufficient to keep the public functionaries within the bounds of law and duty, at that point their usefulness ends.
80
The public officials charged with executing the law might do injustice in heated controversy through unconscious pride of opinion and obstinacy of conclusion.
81
The calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person's humanity.
82
Show me the government which can be maintained only by destroying the rights of a portion of the people; and you will indicate the duty of openly revolting against it.
William Lloyd Garrisonverified·No Compromise with Slavery: An Address Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York·February 14, 1854
83
Slavery cannot bear one ray of light, or the slightest criticism.
William Lloyd Garrisonverified·No Compromise with Slavery: An Address Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York·February 14, 1854
84
All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.
85
The quality of advocacy turns on the depth of the conviction; and government has no power to invade that sanctuary of belief and conscience.
86
Otherwise, free speech which is the strength of the Nation will be the cause of its destruction.
87
The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.
88
Only it seems to me a grievous error in a ruler to quarrel with all his subjects at once.
89
Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.
90
Tyrannous exaction brings on servile concealment; and that again calls forth tyrannous coercion.
91
The love of protecting too often degenerates into downright tyranny.
92
A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry into submission.
93
Her power often gives her what she has no right to, but does not enable her to assert her own rights.
94
If ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept down by it, this has.
95
The world does not count races and nations that have nothing.
96
Every corps is a chain of despots, who, submitting and tyrannizing without exercising their reason, become dead weights of vice and folly on the community.
97
You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time
Attribution contested
No contemporaneous record of Lincoln saying this survives. It first appears in recollections published decades after his death, and has also been credited to P. T. Barnum. Even the wording is unstable: this is McClure's 1901 text, which differs from the version usually quoted today. Treat the phrasing as the compiler's, not Lincoln's.
98
Then let them eat pastry!
Wrongly attributed
Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said this. Rousseau wrote the anecdote in his Confessions about an unnamed great princess; he had drafted the passage by 1767, when Marie Antoinette was eleven years old and still in Austria. The line was attached to her name decades later. Note the wording: this 1782 translation of the Confessions renders the French brioche as pastry; the familiar English form, let them eat cake, is a later translator's choice.