Thurgood Marshall Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

Thurgood Marshall
In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.

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
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

Thurgood Marshall
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
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.

Thurgood Marshall
The dream of America as the great melting pot has not been realized for the Negro; because of his skin color he never even made it into the pot.

Thurgood Marshall
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.

Thurgood Marshall
Lawlessness is lawlessness and anarchy; neither race, color nor frustration is a sufficient excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

Thurgood Marshall
Laws not only provide concrete benefits; they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyway—for good or evil.... The hearts of men do not change themselves.

Thurgood Marshall
I have faith in the efficacy of law. Perhaps that is because I am a lawyer and not a missionary.

Thurgood Marshall
The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today.

Thurgood Marshall
Why of all of the multitudinous groups of people in this country [do] you have to single out Negroes and give them this separate treatment?

Thurgood Marshall
Desegregation is not and was never expected to be an easy task.

Thurgood Marshall
They are graduating every day. That is the one narrow issue involved in this case. When we go from the narrow issue of the individual named plaintiffs involved and get to the class, the class is limited to children of school age. Your school age is something you cannot control and any delay in that is costly.

Thurgood Marshall
Education is not the teaching of the three R's. Education is the teaching of the overall citizenship, to learn to live together with fellow citizens, and above all to learn to obey the law.

Thurgood Marshall
While it may be true that laws and constitutions do not act to right wrong and overturn established folkways overnight, it is also true that the reaffirmation of these principles of democracy build a body of public opinion in which rights and privileges of citizenship may be enjoyed, and in which the more brazen as well as the more sophisticated attempts at deprivation may be halted.

Thurgood Marshall
While the Union survived the Civil War, the Constitution did not.

Thurgood Marshall
We must never forget that the only real source of power that we as judges can tap is the respect of the people.

Thurgood Marshall
In light of the sorry history of discrimination and its devastating impact on the lives of Negroes, bringing the Negro into the mainstream of American life should be a state interest of the highest order. To fail to do so is to ensure that America will remain forever a divided society.

Thurgood Marshall
What's wrong with me? I'm old. I'm getting old and coming apart.

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
While it may not be true that laws and constitutions do not act to right wrong and overturn established folkways overnight, it is also true that the reaffirmation of these principles of democracy builds a body of public opinion in which rights and privileges of citizenship may be enjoyed.

Thurgood Marshall