Quotes by Thurgood Marshall

"A child born to a black mother in a state like Mississippi . . . has the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for."

We can always stick together when we are losing, but tend to find means of breaking up when we're winning. In Grace under Pressure, by Hastie, 1984.

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

Customary greeting to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, What's shaking, chiefy baby?

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.

A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi . . . has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.

Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.

Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.