Thurgood Marshall Best Quotes & Sayings

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

A man can make what he wants of ... — Thurgood Marshall

We must dissent from the fear. — Thurgood Marshall

[It is] a historic step toward eliminating the shameful practice of racial discrimination in the selection of juries. — Thurgood Marshall

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

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

When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery. If not remedied, the scandalous state of our present system of capital punishment will cast a pall of shame over our society for years to come. We cannot let it continue. — Thurgood Marshall

Most Americans who made it past the fourth grade have a pretty good idea who Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were. Not many Americans have even heard of Alice Paul, Howard W. Smith, and Martha Griffiths. But they played almost as big a role in the history of women's rights as Marshall and King played in the history of civil rights for African-Americans. They gave women the handle to the door to economic opportunity, and nearly all the gains women have made in that sphere since the nineteen-sixties were made because of what they did. — Louis Menand

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'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough. — Thurgood Marshall

[T]he Constitution was a product of its times. [Progressive] — Thurgood Marshall

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

What is the quality of your intent? Certain people have a way of saying things that shake us at the core. Even when the words do not seem harsh or offensive, the impact is shattering. What we could be experiencing is the intent behind the words. When we intend to do good, we do. When we intend to do harm, it happens. What each of us must come to realize is that our intent always comes through. — Thurgood Marshall

President Kennedy has named two Negroes to District Judgeships and appointed Thurgood Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals. When I came to the Department of Justice, there were only ten Negroes employed as lawyers; not a single Negro served as a United States Attorney - or ever had in the history of the country. That has been changed. — Robert Kennedy

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

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds. — Thurgood Marshall

Patriotic feelings will surely swell, prompting proud proclamations of the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice shared by the Framers and reflected in a written document now yellowed with age ... [F]or many Americans the bicentennial celebration will be little more than a blind pilgrimage to the shrine of the original document now stored in a vault in the National Archives. [Progressive] — Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall because of his experience of discrimination did bring a special perspective to the court. That's what his colleagues on the court so valued him for as all the tributes pouring in after his retirement attested. — Deborah Rhode

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

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

You do what you think is right and let the law catch up, — Thurgood Marshall

The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis. — 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

Unlike [Woodrow] Wilson, Louis Brandeis did not support the segregation of the federal government. He was personally courteous to African Americans. He advised them and advised the head of Howard University to create a good law school. And that inspired Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall in their path-breaking work on behalf of desegregation. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

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

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

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