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

The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.

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.

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.

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.

By perseverance the snail reached the ark.

Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

Neither seek nor avoid; take what comes. It is liberty to be affected by nothing. Do not merely endure; be unattached.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.