Thurgood Marshall Quotes.
Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.
My father had a flat rule. He believed that every man’s house was his castle. He had a flat rule: no man could come in his house without his permission.
To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.
What is the quality of your intent?
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.
Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.
The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.
We deal here with the right of all of our children, whatever their race, to an equal start in life and to an equal opportunity to reach their full potential as citizens. Those children who have been denied that right in the past deserve better than to see fences thrown up to deny them that right in the future.
When you hear a lot of stories about Africa, and you get to a place like Kenya and other countries like that, where they think the same way we do, I was happy to find that the Schedule of Rights that I drew for the Kenyan Government was working very well.
The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.
A man can make what he wants of himself if he truly believes that he must be ready for hard work and many heartbreaks.
We could get more action in the South because the Negroes had a feeling that they were being oppressed. But you take New York, for example: they’d give Negroes little five-cent jobs here and there – and they thought they had something. And the same in Chicago and any of the metropolitan areas.
I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston… I saw this man’s dedication, his vision, his willingness to sacrifice, and I told myself, ‘You either shape up or ship out.’ When you are being challenged by a great human being, you know that you can’t ship out.
It is important that the strongest pressures against the continuation of segregation, North or South, be continually and constantly manifested. Probably, as much as anything else, this is the key in the elimination of discrimination in the United States.
