You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. Booker Washington Tweet

• adversity
• civil rights

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. William Faulkner Tweet

• freedom
• civil rights
• equality

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tweet

• civil rights
• justice

This is the context.

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

• civil rights
• slavery

If we are to have that harmony and tranquility, that union of spirit which is the foundation of real national genius and national progress, we must all realize that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language. If we are to create on this continent a free republic and an enlightened civilization that will be capable of reflecting the true greatness and glory of mankind, it will be necessary to regard these differences as accidental and unessential. Calvin Coolidge Tweet

• civil rights
• diversity

Equality before the general rules of law is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured without destroying liberty. It is an equality that neither requires nor assumes people are in fact equal. Our attempt to make people equal in fact by rigging law to produce equal results destroys civility and generalized respect for the law. Government cannot create an advantage for one person without simultaneously creating a disadvantage for another. Walter E. Williams Tweet

• civil rights
• equality