I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

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

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

I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We’re standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn’t matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that’s something that we should think about.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts.

A private soldier has as much right to justice as a major-general.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That’s just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.

The uniform makes for brotherhood, since when universally adopted it covers up all differences of class and country.

So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the constitution of India. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it.

There will be gay couples; it will exist. It is not very nice that people who are married – who divorce in three seconds – don’t want protection for the others. The legal system should protect everyone, not just the few people who think they are above everybody else because they are married.

The man who could go to Africa and rob her of her children, and then sell them into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hand.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

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

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

I am a strong believer that without justice, there is no peace. No lasting peace, anyway.

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

The United States never lost a war or won a conference.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

All people are born alike – except Republicans and Democrats.

AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.

I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.

Our constitution is a ray of hope: H for harmony, O for Opportunity, P for people’s participation and E for equality.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

The U.S. military was segregated ‚til the Korean War, and the blacks in World War Two were totally segregated.

Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.

The solutions to our problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

A calling is you feel – you look out and see the need – maybe it’s the need for the poor, to help poor people. Maybe it’s the need to get involved in the race problem, as Martin Luther King was – felt called.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

Returning to your family and where you came from, and your history… this is what makes you strong. It’s not looking out that’s going to do that – it’s looking in.

There is no such thing as part freedom.