From the public-domain record · 81,371 quotes
Founders, statesmen and world leaders — cited from their collected works.
The figures
For that statement of the right honorable gentleman, as amended and admitted, there is not a shadow of foundation. (Irish cheers.) That you cannot contradict, although you have plenty of myrmidons, and, perhaps, some minions.
In fact, these men have been punished for doing in Ireland that which would be perfectly lawful in England, and which, I believe, is perfectly lawful even in Ireland, under any fair interpretation of the act.
I do not believe the act does justify them; but this I am bound to say, that the interpretation of the act appears to be deliberately applied in a variety of instances for the punishment of simple exclusive dealing.
I want to know what title the resident magistrate had to make such a condition as that. (Opposition cheers.) Most dangerous is this introduction of the new discretion of resident magistrates,--a discretion of imposing new restrictions upon…
Has the administration of the law been of a character to reconcile, or has it been of a character to estrange, or has it been calculated to teach respect for the Government, or to bring the Government into increasing hatred or contempt?
Therefore the exhibition of particular instances is a very unsafe and insufficient test.
There must be, and will be, cases of harsh and unreasonable persecution under the name of boycotting.
I repeat my lamentations that some of the most difficult and the nicest parts of the law are removed by the operation of the Coercion Act of last year from judges and juries to men whom I termed of an inferior stamp.
The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.
Everywhere in the south the colored man is learning to read.
Another ground of hope for our race is in the progress of education.
We are no longer four millions of slaves, but six millions of freemen.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
The conditions of success are universal and unchangeable.
The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and nations are impartial and eternal.
But whether it shall come late or come soon will depend mainly upon ourselves.
Notwithstanding the great and all-abounding darkness of our past, the clouds that still overhang us in the moral and social sky, the defects inherited from a bygone condition of servitude, it is the faith of my soul that this brighter and…
