Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould Quotes

If a democracy is to remain real and stable, the majority must be humane and farsighted enough to take care of minorities who have serious objections to the majorities point of view and who, because of lack of numbers, do not have the political strength to impose their own policy solutions through their own political power.

Minority rights are just as important as majority decisions.

Sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.

We are against the majority tyrannizing the minority. But we are definitely against the minority tyrannizing the majority.

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

Look not to the size of cathedrals or even to the words on the statute books for proof of the reality of religious freedom. Ask what is the fate of the Protestant in Spain, the Jew in Saudi Arabia, the Arab in Israel, the Catholic in Poland or the atheist in the United States?

[We] must come to understand what it means to be a member of the minority or other small partner people, and to be ready to give that minority assurances which are necessary for a majority..

The majority are not morally free to become a tyranny and destroy the rights of minorities.

Shall we judge a country by the majority, or the minority? By the minority, surely.

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.

So long as a minority conforms to the majority, it is not even a minority.

When a respectable minority objects to any rule of conduct, it would be dignified for the majority ... to yield.... Numerical strength savors of violence when it acts in total disregard of any strongly felt opinion of the minority.

Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.

We’ve gone down the road of multiculturalism, which ostensibly says that all minorities have equal status to the majority, The result has been that we have handed minorities a stick with which to beat the majority.

It doesn’t matter what the religion of the country or the ruler is so long as minority rights are protected.

[Sometimes] the minorities are too respectable, not to be entitled to some sacrifice of opinion, in the majority.

Ours is a constitutional freedom where the popular will is the law supreme and minorities are sacredly protected.

The great majority of the states look upon segregation as discrimination. And those few states that have a special problem in this respect will, in a variety of ways, slowly have to solve their problem and accept the will of the majority.

A privilege accruing to the majority ceases to be such.

… though the majority might be temporarily wrong, in the end, a majority that remained a majority over a period of years was usually right, and in our country, at least, we have been governed by the will of the majority. It has not meant, nor I surmise, does it mean in the present, the destruction of minorities …

… courts today are less inclined to allow majoritarian coercion of unpopular or disliked minority groups, especially when blatant racism . . . religious prejudice, or some other constitutionally suspect motivation, can be discovered behind such legislation