3 perspectives still startlingly impacting our collective work on democracy:
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.
I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal’.
-- James Henry Hammond, South Carolina senator 1858
Arguments that some races are “inferior, rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and…transform this Government into a government of some other form. The idea that it is beneficial for some people to be dominated by others is the argument “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent."
-- Abraham Lincoln, Months after Hammond’s speech addressing German immigrants in Chicago
...[t]he relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, “I dissent.”
-- Justice Sonia Sotomayor
OK, a fourth for good measure:
