The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.

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

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

Patriotic feelings will surely swell, prompting proud proclamations of the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice shared by the Framers and reflected in a written document now yellowed with age . . . [F]or many Americans the bicentennial celebration will be little more than a blind pilgrimage to the shrine of the original document now stored in a vault in the National Archives. [Progressive]

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

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.

I cannot accept this invitation [to celebrate the bicentenial of the Constitution], for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia Convention... To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start. [Progressive]