civil rights Quotes

“The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.”

“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”

“Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand.”

“Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women—black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men. There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.”

“While Horton chased after, with groans, over stones that tattered his toenails and battered his bones, and begged, ‘Please don’t harm all my little folks, who have as much right to live as us bigger folks do!‘”

“I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!”

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

″‘They don’t want us banding together for higher wages or better housing,’ said Marta. ‘The owners think if Mexicans have no hot water, that we won’t mind as long as we think no one has any.‘”

“To lay down a man’s right to anything is to divest himself of the liberty of hindering another of the benefit of his own right to the same.”

“‘You see this scar on the top of my head?’ He tilted his head to show me. ‘I got that scar in Greene County, Alabama trying to register to vote in 1964. You see this scar on the side of my head? […] I got that scar in Mississippi demanding civil rights. […] These aren’t my scars, cuts and bruises. These are my medals of honor.‘”

“The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury.”

“No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

“Those that are found guilty of theft among them are bound to make restitution to the owner, and not, as it is in other places, to the prince, for they reckon that the prince has no more right to the stolen goods than the thief.”

“Justice is the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a debt.”

“You’ve gotta learn to defend yourself. You kids should have been given some training in self-defense . . . It’s never too late. It takes a warrior to fight a battle and survive. This here is a battle if I’ve ever seen one.”

“I knew for certain something would have to change if I were going to stay in that school. Either the students would have to change the way they behaved, or I would have to devise a better plan to protect myself. My body was wearing out real fast.”

“I can’t turn around without hearing about some ‘civil rights advance’! White people seem to think the black ought to be shouting ‘hallelujah’! Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man’s back – and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man’s supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it’s still going to leave a scar!”

“As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

“A new civil rights movement cannot be organized around the relics of the earlier system of control if it is to address meaningfully the racial realities of our time. Any racial justice movement, to be successful, must vigorously challenge the public consensus that underlies the prevailing system of control.”

″ But in this enlightened age to hope to dupe the people by the arts they are practicing is still more extraordinary.”

“In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.”

“When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. ”

“The truth is, the status quo loves to say no. It is the easiest thing in the world to say no, especially in the world of business and finance. But for the first time we were discussing civil rights, and no other civil rights issue has ever been questioned because of the cost.”