Rush Limbaugh Quotes

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

Defending birthright citizenship is about being on the right side of liberty. The 14th Amendment is a great legacy of the Republican Party.

The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.

When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of the state, there must be some stage in the progress of the elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the law.

Declare for such an amendment of the Constitution as will positively prohibit African slavery in the United States.

I think we ought to leave the law exactly the way it is, the 14th amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment, after the civil war, in principle brought former slaves into the category of persons, theoretically. But if you actually look, almost all the cases brought up for personal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment were by corporations. Freed slaves couldn't do it. In fact they were pretty much driven back into something like slavery by a north - south compact, that allowed former slave states to criminalize black life, which made a criminal force that was basically used as a forced labor force, up until the 1930s.

There is great fear expressed on all sides lest this war shall be made a war for the negro. I am willing that it shall be. It is awar to found an empire on the negro in slavery, and shame on us if we do not make it a war to establish the negro in freedom--against whom the whole nation, North and South, East and West, in one mighty conspiracy, has combined from the beginning.

If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.

In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts.

..remember that under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship.

I'm really disturbed about the gay marriage thing. Because I think gay people should get married, cause it's their own business ... Because as a Black man, I think you've got to be against any form of discrimination.

If your Bible tells you that gay people ought not be married in your church, don't tell them they can't be married at city hall. Marriage is a civil rite as well a civil right, and we can't let religious bigotry close the door to justice to anyone.

You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then exclusively to save the Union.

Same sex marriage isn't gay privilege, it's equal rights. Privilege would be something like gay people not paying taxes. Like churches don't.

New Rule: Gay marriage won't lead to dog marriage. It is not a slippery slope to rampant inter-species coupling. When women got the right to vote, it didn't lead to hamsters voting. No court has extended the equal protection clause to salmon. And for the record, all marriages are "same sex" marriages. You get married, and every night, it's the same sex.

The Civil War was fought, in a sense, over whether that sentence - all men are created equal - is to be taken literally. And the southerners in the 1850s argued that it was not.

The Constitution favors no racial group - no political or social group.

Slavery will not be overthrown without excitement, a most tremendous excitement.

Marriage equality is the law of the land. Officials should be held to their duty to uphold the law - end of story.

I'm personally supportive of marriage equality for gay couples and I believe that it will happen over time.

[on marriage equality] It literally is a threat to the nation's survival in the long run.

Everyone has the right to be happy and be treated equally and I think not allowing gay marriage just kind of puts us back. I believe you're in love with who you're in love with, and you should be able to marry them. No one should tell someone else how to think or how to feel.

The day is not distant when we must bear and adopt [the abolition of slavery], or worse will follow.