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Thurgood Marshall Quotes

Thurgood Marshall Quotes.

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
Do what you think is right and let the law catch up.
Thurgood Marshall
Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals. Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.
Thurgood Marshall
Truth is more than a mental exercise.
Thurgood Marshall
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.
Thurgood Marshall
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
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
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
To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.
Thurgood Marshall
To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.
Thurgood Marshall
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
It was taken for granted that we had to make something of ourselves. Not much was said about it; it was just in the atmosphere of the home.
Thurgood Marshall
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
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.
Thurgood Marshall
I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories… We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust… We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.
Thurgood Marshall
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.
Thurgood Marshall
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.
Thurgood Marshall
Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.
Thurgood Marshall
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
Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.
Thurgood Marshall
I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.
Thurgood Marshall
What is the quality of your intent?
Thurgood Marshall
In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.
Thurgood Marshall
The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.
Thurgood Marshall
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