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

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?

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

The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases.

a Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire

This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain.

The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.

This custom of ostracism was not intended as a punishment for crime, but was called, in order to give it a plausible title, a check to excessive power.

we ought to give our friend pain if it will benefit him, but not to the extent of breaking off our friendship; but just as we make use of some biting medicine, that will save and preserve the life of the patient

freedom in speech is friendly and has weight, but reproach is selfish and little

He who is wise tries to harmonise the wishes that seek for self-gratification with the wish for the social good, and only thus can he realise his higher self.