“To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.”

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.

The death penalty is no more effective a deterrent than life imprisonment. It is also evident that the burden of capital punishment falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the underprivileged members of society.

Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.

Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place.

The Constitution was a product of its times.

Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.

What is the quality of your intent?

We must dissent from the fear.

We can always stick together when we are losing, but tend to find means of breaking up when we’re winning.

I cannot accept this invitation for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever ‘fixed’ at the Philadelphia Convention… To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start. [Progressive]

Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process.

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society.

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots.

Today’s Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.

You want to spend your millions on a worthless cause? Try donating it to the Democrats.

The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.

No country is free unless it is democratic.

The building of America has had its fair share of mistakes, but it’s a constitution that’s the jewel of democracy, the envy of many, and it’s the most generous nation in the world.

I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.

The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.

I took my grandmother to the emergency room. The doctor said that she was on an artificial life support system, and that although her brain was dead her heart was still beating. I though, “we’ve never had a democrat in the family before”.

The whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one another, so as not to depend upon the understanding of one man.