I do not allow myself to be moved by anything except the law. If there has been a mistake in the law, or if I think there has been... perjury or injustice, I will weigh the petition most carefully, but I do not permit myself to be moved by more harrowing details, and I try to treat each case as if I was reviewing it or hearing it for the first time from the bench.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment t...o your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non- violent....... They must harass, debate, petition, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps--and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.... The acceptance of our condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children [ellipses in source].LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Prophecy today is hardly the romantic business that it used to be. The old tools of the trade, like the sword, the hair shirt, and... the long fast in the wilderness, have given way to more contemporary, mundane instruments of doom--the book, the picket and the petition, the sit-in ... at City Hall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Maybe we were the blind mechanics of disaster, but you don't pin the guilt on the scientists that easily. You might as well pin it... on M motherhood.... Every man who ever worked on this thing told you what would happen. The scientists signed petition after petition, but nobody listened. There was a choice. It was build the bombs and use them, or risk that the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Clay answered the petition by declaring that while he looked on the institution of slavery as an evil, it was 'nothing in comparis...on with the far greater evil which would inevitably flow from a sudden and indiscriminate emancipation.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, an...d a man's life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is evil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who,... esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man. But it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »