Quotation Saturday

CIVIL RIGHTS

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
~  Søren Kierkegaard

“Being an American is about having the right to be who you are. Sometimes that doesn't happen.”
~ Herb Ritts

“To cheapen the lives of any group of men, cheapens the lives of all men, even our own. This is a law of human psychology, or human nature. And it will not be repealed by our wishes, nor will it be merciful to our blindness.”
~ William Pickens

“To-day, in more than half of Europe, man is at the mercy of the police; in 1900 even the most conservative and reactionary Prussian Junker would have been unable to imagine, let alone approve, that a citizen could be arrested and kept in prision at the pleasure of the Government.”
~ Salvador de Madariaga, Essays with a Purpose

“To-day, in more than half of Europe, man is at the mercy of the police; in 1900 even the most conservative and reactionary Prussian Junker would have been unable to imagine, let alone approve, that a citizen could be arrested and kept in prision at the pleasure of the Government.”
~ Salvador de Madariaga, Essays with a Purpose

CIVIC DUTY

“To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.”
~ David McCullough

“The average juror wraps himself in civic virtue. He's a judge now. He tries to act the part and do the right thing.”

“It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity”

~ Benito Mussolini (Italian dictator, 1883-1945) "It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error." ~ Justice Robert H. Jackson "... any broad unlimited power to hold laws unconstitutional because they offend what this Court conceives to be the `conscience of our people' ... was not given by the Framers, but rather has been bestowed on the Court by the Court." ~Justice Hugo Black "The Court has assumed, gradually, the role of deciding the problems on its own and ...the American people and their selected officials gradually have accepted the Court as the political instrument for lawmaking." ~Prof. William Forrester, Cornell law school "Obviously, a man's judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process, and make him something less than a man." ~ Arthur Hays Sulzberger, 1891-1968, American newspaper publisher