America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.

I will never relent in defending America – whatever it takes.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it’s again not people who are intrinsically evil.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‚Well, yeah,‘ but you start to think, ‚Why not, though?‘ What makes one more valuable than another?

I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn’t educate America if they started at 6:30.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

You can’t put democracy and freedom back into a box.

I love diversity.

I perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model.

Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

In America there’s no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

The little man is still a man.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.

Our strategic dialogue with China can both protect American interests and uphold our principles, provided we are honest about our differences on human rights and other issues and provided we use a mix of targeted incentives and sanctions to narrow these differences.

We believe that every single child has boundless promise, no matter who they are, where they come from, or how much money their parents have. We’ve got to remember that. We believe that each of these young people is a vital part of the great American story.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

Now you have a choice: we can give more tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, or we can start rewarding companies that open new plants and train new workers and create new jobs here, in the United States of America.

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin‘ hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.

States should have the right to enact laws… particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

The assertion that ‚all men are created equal‘ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.

To the best of my judgment, I have labored for, and not against, the Union. As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren. I have constantly declared, as I really believed, the only difference between them and us is the difference of circumstances.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.