James Forten Quotes

The tyranny that now exists is actual. That which may exist in the future is potential. If we are always to draw back from change with the thought that the change may be for the worse, then there is no hope at all of ever escaping injustice.

The ancient liberal faith ... that our course be governed not by the dead hand of yesterday's facts and prejudices but by the living realities of today and our aspiration for tomorrow. It is this genius for making change serve the eternal unchanging values we cherish that is the very essence of American liberalism.

You don’t go from tyranny to democracy overnight.

America is a conservative country with a small “c” - they want change, but they don’t want too much change too fast.

If people are not patient and want radical change, it could set China back in a way to harm a lot of people. I advocate more freedom based on stability.

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be.

This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe. at least the enlightened part of it, for light & liberty go together.

Every reform means awakening. Once truly awakened, the nation will not be satisfied with reform only in one department of life.

Liberty must be allowed to work out its natural results; and these will, ere long, astonish the world.

Let's move forward and fix America's problems.

But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay, I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

What produces the general good is always terrible or seems bizarre when begun too soon. The Revolution must stop when it has perfected public happiness and liberty through the laws.

I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.

I don't think there will ever be a time when people will stop wanting to bring about change.

We do need great change in Burma. We are trying to build a new society, a society where basic human rights are respected, and where our people enjoy all the benefits of democratic institutions.

America certainly has made extraordinary progress. The collective unconscious of the nation has certainly shifted as a result of the civil rights movement and the developments in the '70s and '80s. We have witnessed a great expansion of the black middle class.

For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability. Oppression became common, but stability never arrived. We must take a different approach. We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom, and strive to build a community of peaceful, democratic nations.

The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free.

This is an amazing country, for all of its faults. My feeling is, dig in and let's try to change the world. Dissent is not only your right, it's your duty.

Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be effected by the engines of national power. Let us, through persuasion and education, seek to improve institutions we deem defective. But let us, in doing so, respect the orderly processes of the law. Any other course enthrones tyrants and dooms freedom.

Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Some things I found out in the National Convention I wasn't too glad I did find out. But we will work hard, and it was important to actually really bring this out to the open, the things I will say some people knew about and some people didn't; this stuff that has been kept under the cover for so many years. Actually, the world and America is upset and the only way to bring about a change is to upset it more.

Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.