Civil Rights Quotes - Page 3

• You can't rise as a class. You have to rise individually. It's what many of the civil rights-era people don't understand.

  Alphonso Jackson

  Teamwork, Rights, Class

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• Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor.

  Malcolm X

  Truth, Racism, Hajj

  "Malcolm X Speaks". Book by George Breitman, 1965.

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• I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience

  Bernice Johnson Reagon

  Rights, People, Focus

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• I had advocated the establishment of a Negro industrial commission. I had gestured against the growth of monopoly power. I had introduced a few civil rights bills.

  Emanuel Celler

  Rights, Monopoly Power, Growth

  Emanuel Celler (1953). “You Never Leave Brooklyn: The Autobiography of Emanuel Celler”

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• Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as our prince of peace, of civil rights. We owe him something major that will keep his memory alive.

  Morgan Freeman

  Kings, Memories, Rights

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• If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country, because he refuses to leave the back of the bus.

  Kinky Friedman

  Country, Hippie, Rights

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• I don't call myself a white supremacist. I'm a civil rights activist concerned about European-American rights.

  David Duke

  Rights, Europe, White

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• The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.

  Ida B. Wells

  Law, Rights, Giving

  Ida B. Wells-Barnett (2014). “On Lynchings”, p.16, Courier Corporation

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• By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

  Constance Baker Motley

  Leadership, Kings, Rights

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• The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.

  Maggie Gallagher

  Rights, White, Racism

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• A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Leadership

  An address at the Episcopal National Cathedral, Washington D.C, March 31, 1968.

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• The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

  Thomas Jefferson

  July, Flames, Too Much

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence, cont”, p.218

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• 

  Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

  Martin Luther

  Inspirational, Faith, Hope

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• There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Love, Life, Sad

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2011). “Why We Can't Wait”, p.67, Beacon Press

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• the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Rights, Law, Majority Rule

  First Inaugural Address, 4 Mar. 1801

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• Unconditional love will have the final word in reality.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Peace, Kings, Truth

  Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, 10 Dec. 1964

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• No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, America, Rights

  Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

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• The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Communication, Writing, Liberty

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• I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Anchors, Law

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1859). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence”, p.71

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• At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Lying, Government, Law

  "Burdeau v. McDowell, 256 U.S. 465, 477". Dissenting opinion, 1921.

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• Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.

  Dick Gregory

  Respect, Confused, Rights

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• An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Life, Greatness, Diversity

  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (2017). “The Measure of a Man”, p.18, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Peace

  Strength to Love ch. 7 (1963)

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• Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, President, Safe

  Letter to Charles Yancey, 6 Jan. 1816

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• To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Leadership, Freedom, Business

  "Poems of Problems" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, "Protest", (pp. 154 - 155), 1914.

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