William J. Brennan Jr. Quotes

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

And nothing embittered me, which is important, because I think ethnic people and women in this society can end up being embittered because of the lack of affirmative action, you know.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.

White folks don't want peace; they want quiet. The price you pay for peace is justice.

Our nation's long neglect of minorities whose skin is dark is perhaps only a little worse than our neglect of another minority whose hair is white.

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

Costs are incurred whenever any group is treated as lesser or the other, whether they are women, racial, or religious minorities, or the LGBT.

I would be with those who say the hierarchy in the United States has badly mishandled this whole situation.

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege.

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.

I usually play disenfranchised youth.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

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

Inequality doesn't create unhappiness.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

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

Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon ... that it is readily regarded as something natural, even by its victims.

Israel has not always been wise enough to invest equally in all its people.

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

A person who is no longer with us has a rather difficult time proving his innocence …. In Texas and elsewhere in the country, people’s innocence is determined by their income.