What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

The right to bear arms is only slightly less idiotic than the right to arm bears.

If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed.

It is fair to judge peoples by the rights they will sacrifice most for.

An accurate charting of American women's progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time-but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal.

Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

Civil rights took us all by surprise. Every night we'd wait until the news to see what "Dr. King and dem" were doing. It was like watching the Olympics or the World Series when somebody colored was on.

He was pursuing the dream of a free country, the dream of a country so vast that each man would have room to bury his dead on his own land.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.