The quote database

I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

Our diplomacy should be direct and frank, neither seeking to obtain more nor accepting less than is our due.

One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.

The most serious effect upon the poor comes when dependence upon the charitable society is substituted for the natural outgoing of human love and sympathy, which, happily, we all possess in some degree.

The right to dissent peaceably, within the guardrails of our Republic, is perhaps our nation's greatest strength.

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.

The constitutional right of free expression is powerful medicine in a society as diverse and populous as ours.

The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.

In regard to foreign nations, the groundwork of my policy will be justice on our part to all, submitting to injustice from none.

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. The observing should always be done with his full knowledge and hearty coöperation.

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

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.

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

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

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.