Thurgood Marshall Best Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.

Thurgood Marshall

#5. I'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.

Thurgood Marshall

#6. 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

#7. Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

Thurgood Marshall

#8. When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.

Constance Baker Motley

#9. 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

#10. The Ku Klux Klan never dies. They just stop wearing sheets because sheets cost too much.

Thurgood Marshall

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Son, when I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everybody to know he's a nigger. [Said to an aide in 1965 regarding the appointment of Thurgood Marshall as associate justice of the Supreme Court]

Lyndon B. Johnson

#14. Customary greeting to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, What's shaking, chiefy baby?

Thurgood Marshall

#15. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

Thurgood Marshall

#16. To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.

Thurgood Marshall

#17. A man can make what he wants of ...

Thurgood Marshall

#18. In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.

Thurgood Marshall

#19. You do what you think is right and let the law catch up,

Thurgood Marshall

#20. 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

#21. Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process.

Thurgood Marshall

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. What is the quality of your intent?

Thurgood Marshall

#25. 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

#26. Truth is more than a mental exercise.

Thurgood Marshall

#27. Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place.

Thurgood Marshall

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. We must dissent from the fear.

Thurgood Marshall