Top 42 Thurgood Marshall Quotes
#1. To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.
Thurgood Marshall
#3. 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.
Thurgood Marshall
#4. Some years ago I said in an opinion that if this country is a melting pot, then either the Afro-Americans didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.
Thurgood Marshall
#5. Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place.
Thurgood Marshall
#7. Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.
Thurgood Marshall
#9. 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.
Thurgood Marshall
#10. It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas ... This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, ... is fundamental to our free society.
Thurgood Marshall
#11. Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process.
Thurgood Marshall
#12. I cannot accept this invitation [to celebrate the bicentenial of the Constitution], 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]
Thurgood Marshall
#14. In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.
Thurgood Marshall
#16. A man can make what he wants of himself if he truly believes that he must be ready for hard work and many heartbreaks.
Thurgood Marshall
#17. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
Thurgood Marshall
#18. Customary greeting to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, What's shaking, chiefy baby?
Thurgood Marshall
#19. 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.
Thurgood Marshall
#20. The First Amendment serves not only the needs of the polity but also those of the human spirit- a spirit that demands self-expression .
Thurgood Marshall
#21. The Ku Klux Klan never dies. They just stop wearing sheets because sheets cost too much.
Thurgood Marshall
#22. Nothing can be more notorious than the calumnies and invectives with which the wisest measures and most virtuous characters of The United States have been pursued and traduced [By American Newspapers]
Thurgood Marshall
#24. 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.
Thurgood Marshall
#25. I'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.
Thurgood Marshall
#26. I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.
Thurgood Marshall
#27. 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.
Thurgood Marshall
#28. The ban directly hampers the partys ability to spread its message and hamstrings voters seeking to inform themselves about the candidates and issues,
Thurgood Marshall
#29. The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis.
Thurgood Marshall
#30. Our Constitution is the envy of the world, as it should be for it is the grand design of the finest nation on earth.
Thurgood Marshall
#31. Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.
Thurgood Marshall
#32. The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today.
Thurgood Marshall
#33. [Jurors who are opposed to capital punishment are] more likely to believe that a defendant's failure to testify is indicative of his guilt, more hostile to the insanity defense, more mistrustful of defense attorneys and less concerned about the danger of erroneous convictions.
Thurgood Marshall
#34. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.
Thurgood Marshall
#35. 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.
Thurgood Marshall
#36. Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.
Thurgood Marshall
#37. A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi ... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.
Thurgood Marshall
#39. [It is] a historic step toward eliminating the shameful practice of racial discrimination in the selection of juries.
Thurgood Marshall
#40. Racism separates, but it never liberates. Hatred generates fear, and fear once given a foothold; binds, consumes and imprisons. Nothing is gained from prejudice. No one benefits from racism.
Thurgood Marshall
#41. History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.
Thurgood Marshall
#42. We can always stick together when we are losing, but tend to find means of breaking up when we're winning. In Grace under Pressure, by Hastie, 1984.
Thurgood Marshall
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