Great Throughts Treasury

"The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with."

"There is no reason to repeat bad history."

"The essence of a free life is being able to choose the style of living you prefer free from exclusion and without the compulsion of conformity or law."

"With children no longer the universally accepted reason for marriage, marriages are going to have to exist on their own merits."

"Affirmative action is the most important modern anti-discrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination. No one who knows anything about the subject would say it hasn't worked. It has certainly done something, or else it wouldn't have provoked so much opposition."

"Disintegration of the family is the greatest problem facing the African-American community... And there are no simple, easy answers to this. Government has a role, but you have to be careful. How do you get into someone's family and try and save it; convince young men that they have responsibilities, young men who often feel they have no future and no hope."

"I don't for a moment believe that women have suffered the same kind of injustices that blacks have -- women have never been enslaved. But still, many of the psychological and economic problems are the same. This country would go bankrupt in a day if the Supreme Court suddenly ordered the powers-that-be to pay back wages to children of slaves and to the women who've worked all their lives for half wages or no pay."

"Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the Black middle class."

"Men without jobs do not form families."

"Most people think civil rights today is about whether or not I'm turning down somebody at the door because he is black or female. It doesn't happen that way anymore. It is more subtle. It happens when women are asked at a job interview, Do you intend to get pregnant within the next two years? And it happens to women much more than it happens to blacks, because blacks have spent more than 300 years trying to educate the country about how perverse it all is."

"If diversity is what is a central value in every selective university in the United States, then it ought to be seen as a compelling interest by the Supreme Court."

"On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family life"

"I have not been animated in my life to fight against race and sex discrimination simply because of my own identity. That would mean that one must be South African to fight apartheid, or a poor white in Appalachia to fight poverty, or Jewish to fight anti-Semitism. And I just reject that conception of how struggles should be waged."

"Nobody is going to buy into the next million [employees] without having some sense what happened to the first million... This is too big for me to put my faith in."

"Our message is clear. We count. Children count. Everybody counts, so count everybody,"

"Perfect voting record on affirmative action when it has come under assault."

"Shootouts at Easter egg hunts -- that's what it comes down to."

"The amount and depth of the torture that's been alleged and corroborated leaves no doubt in my mind that what we saw was a staged interrogation,"

"The first thing people have got to do is to stop believing there's going to be any action anytime soon, ... It's obviously a prime piece of land. It's what's on the land that makes development difficult."

"The question has been asked, 'What is a woman?' A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman is a dreamer. A woman is a planner. A woman is a maker, and a molder. A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman builds bridges. A woman makes children and makes cars. A woman writes poetry and songs. A woman is a person who makes choices. You cannot even simply become a mother anymore. You must choose motherhood. Will you choose change? Can you become its vanguard?"

"The tests we've had do not inspire confidence."

"This is a radical assault on the separation of powers. I can't imagine this House going for it."

"They would have been pulling people off of Y2K to track funds, ... continue to do everything I can to protect those [federal Y2K] dollars for the district."

"There are not many males, black or white, who wish to get involved with a woman who's committed to her own development"

"We have trivialized this park, residents make too little use of it, and tourists don't know where it is, ... Neither the city or the federal government has bothered to make maximum use of it. The problem is that it had no plan and it's in a state of great deterioration."

"What a new commission would have to do is more complex than the Kerner Commission, ... It's more complex than passing laws that this House and the Senate passed."

"This is a victory for home rule. The numerous people who have something to say about this have basically supported our right to decide our own fate through our own laws."

"You can't whip folks into line on statehood like you can on a budget vote. People have to believe in your cause."

"When my sisters and I were kids going to DC public schools, school supplies were not the big deal they are today... Giving today's children the basic supplies they need is a good way to start them off thinking positively about doing well in school."