William J. Brennan Jr. Quotes

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

Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

After World War II Black American veterans discovered that German prisoners of war could become citizens and enjoy more democracy in America than they could.

Let me say … how deeply grateful all people of good will are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality.

American democracy is a failure. It is a miserable failure. It has failed because it is a limited and racial and divisible democracy …. How can we fight for democracy in Burma, a country we have not seen, when we don't have democracy in Birmingham, a city we have seen.

I never will let anyone make, maneuver me into making a distinction between the Mississippi form of discrimination and the New York City form of discrimination. It's, it's both discrimination; it's all discrimination.

I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites. ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time.

There's not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

While housing discrimination and segregation in 2005 still affect millions of people, that's not the way it has to be. Some things can change and should.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.

It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.

The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

We don't live in a society that has genuine equality, and every woman we know has experienced that.

We of Africa protest that, in this day and age, we should continue to be treated as lesser human beings than other races.

There's no such thing as second class citizenship. That's like telling me you can be a little bit pregnant.

The MLK Shabbat Suppers focused on the theme of educational inequity, which Dr. King considered inextricably linked to the struggle for equality and justice.

Equality under the law is the slow triumph of hope over history.

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

Even here in America, people are fighting for civil rights 45 years after the civil rights movement.

It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.

The bill neither confers nor abridges the rights of anyone but simply declares that in civil rights there shall be equality among all classes of citizens and that all alike shall be subject to the same punishment.