Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quotes

We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing 'Kumbaya'. We don't really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.

No free Negro, mulatto, or Indian, whatsoever, shall hereafter have any vote at the election of burgesses, or any other election whatsoever

If segregationists had their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate today, I would not be a top contender to be president of the United States.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Civil Rights Act.

Countless black citizens in the South couldn't vote. They were second-class citizens from cradle to grave. The discrimination was terrible, brutal.

The colored man is in the South to stay there. He will not leave it voluntarily and he cannot be driven out. He had no voice in being carried into the South, but he will have a very loud voice in any attempt to put him out.

Americans of our own time - minority and majority Americans alike - need the continued guidance that the Voting Rights Act provides. We have come a long way, but more needs to be done.

So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isn't because of Black Power, isn't because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; it's not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities.

It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

I knew that I could vote and that that wasn't a privilege; it was my right. Every time I tried I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived.

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.

I'd like to think I would have signed the Civil Rights bill and wouldn't have had any issues with it.

History did not end in 1965. Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.

Negroes could not vote in those days. When I went to Massachusetts and ran for office, it was the first time in my life that I ever voted.

Negro suffrage is political arsenic. If it is not, why do not the free States open wide their throats and gulp down the graceful and invigorating draught?

Essentially, Eisenhower passed on to his successors the problem of guaranteeing constitutional rights to Negro citizens.

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

This civil rights program about which you have heard so much is a farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty. I am opposed to that program. I fought it in Congress. It is the province of the state to run its own elections.

The right to vote with no ifs, ands, or buts, that's the key. When the Negroes get that, they'll have every politician, north and south, east and west, kissing their ass, begging for their support.

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?

This is Selma, Alabama where there are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.

The time has gone by for colored people to talk of patriotism: ... He used to be proud that his grandfather … fought for liberty in the Revolutionary War. But that time had passed by.

Votes for women didn’t come until the 1920’s. Votes for Blacks didn’t effectively come until the 1960’s.