Top 35 Thurgood Marshall Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis.”

— Thurgood Marshall

2. “In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.”

— Thurgood Marshall

3. “To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.”

— Thurgood Marshall

4. “We must dissent from the fear.”

— Thurgood Marshall

5. “What is the quality of your intent?”

— Thurgood Marshall

6. “A man can make what he wants of himself if he truly believes that he must be ready for hard work and many heartbreaks.”

— Thurgood Marshall

7. “Truth is more than a mental exercise.”

— Thurgood Marshall

8. “Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.”

— Thurgood Marshall

9. “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place.”

— Thurgood Marshall

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

— Thurgood Marshall

11. “Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.”

— Thurgood Marshall

12. “Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.”

— Thurgood Marshall

13. “If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.”

— Thurgood Marshall

14. “What’s shaking, chiefy baby?”

— Thurgood Marshall

15. “The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society.”

— Thurgood Marshall

16. “Our Constitution is the envy of the world, as it should be for it is the grand design of the finest nation on earth.”

— Thurgood Marshall

17. “None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots.”

— Thurgood Marshall

18. “Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.”

— Thurgood Marshall

19. “None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.”

— Thurgood Marshall

20. “The First Amendment serves not only the needs of the polity but also those of the human spirit- a spirit that demands self-expression .”

— Thurgood Marshall

21. “The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.”

— Thurgood Marshall

22. “Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process.”

— Thurgood Marshall

23. “When the prison gates slam behind an inmate, he does not lose his human quality; his mind does not become closed to ideas; his intellect does not cease to feed on a free and open interchange of opinions; his yearning for self-respect does not end; nor is his quest for self-realization concluded.”

— Thurgood Marshall

24. “The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today.”

— Thurgood Marshall

25. “Racism separates, but it never liberates. Hatred generates fear, and fear once given a foothold; binds, consumes and imprisons. Nothing is gained from prejudice. No one benefits from racism.”

— Thurgood Marshall

26. “Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.”

— Thurgood Marshall

27. “Customary greeting to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, What’s shaking, chiefy baby?”

— Thurgood Marshall

28. “The Ku Klux Klan never dies. They just stop wearing sheets because sheets cost too much.”

— Thurgood Marshall

29. “I’m the world’s original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.”

— Thurgood Marshall

30. “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.”

— Thurgood Marshall

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

— Thurgood Marshall

32. “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.”

— Thurgood Marshall

33. “A man can make what he wants of...”

— Thurgood Marshall

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

— Thurgood Marshall

35. “Some years ago I said in an opinion that if this country is a melting pot, then either the Afro-Americans didn’t get in the pot or he didn’t get melted down.”

— Thurgood Marshall