Harry A. Blackmun Quotes

Liberty without equality is a name of noble sound and squalid result.

God, who is the embodiment of Truth and Right and Justice, can never have sanctioned a religion or practice which regards one - fifth of our vast population as untouchables.

Inequality is a fact. Equality is a value.

Can law, human law, change the nature of things? Can it turn darkness into light, or evil into good? By no means. Notwithstanding ten thousand laws, right is right, and wrong is wrong still. There must still remain an essential difference between justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy. … Who can reconcile this treatment of the Negroes, first and last, with either mercy or justice?

Discrimination will impair democracy.

For as long as I can remember, I've always been interested in issues of social justice, political freedom, and civil rights.

I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion.

If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.

My work always presents problems in our society. Those problems may be anything from injustice to freedom, and everything related to humanity.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.

For a long time in the United States, in practice if not in principle, only white, male, Protestants were born free and equal.

For our part we regard all human life as equally sacred, whether it be the life of an Empress or the life of a charwoman, and we have no desire to emulate our contemporaries in their attempt to magnify the horror of a crime because the victim belonged to the former rank of life rather than the latter.

Equality ... is the result of human organization.... We are not born equal.

We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses, for the unrepresented consumer – for all … who do not partake of the abundance of American life.

... all good Americans, while verbally asking for nothing but equal rights, ... interpret the phrase so that equal rights become equivalent to special rights.

All men are equal before God, but all men are not equal before men because the differences are obvious.

All men are created equal. Some, it appears, are created a little more equal than others.

Is the Jew a man? He is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh, my fellow; and he shall not, if I can prevent it, be a slave! I demand for him equal rights and privileges, and a place within the pale of the Constitution!" Let all the people say, Even so, AMEN!

The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.

No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible.

I don't happen to believe, by the way, that immigration policies that single people out because of religion, for instance, are fair and just.

I must be intellectually honest and say there is a great justice deficit among us. Not all Brazilians are treated equally.