What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

We must recognize the full human equality of all our people - before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this not because it is …

What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about thei…

We know that if one man's rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered. (5-6-1961)

Violence and racism are bad. Whenever they occur they are to be condemned (and) we should not turn a blind eye to them.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society…

The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never…