The quote database

Then let them eat pastry!

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

General propositions do not decide concrete cases.

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.

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