Thurgood Marshall Quotes - Page 2

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

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

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]

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.

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.

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.

Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.

Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights.

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

The First Amendment serves not only the needs of the polity but also those of the human spirit - a spirit that demands self-expression .

The ban directly hampers the partys ability to spread its message and hamstrings voters seeking to inform themselves about the candidates and issues.

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]

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

What's shaking, chiefy baby?

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

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

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]

Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.