Justice & equality quotes, explained

The last words of the Gettysburg Address, spoken at a cemetery for Union soldiers. Lincoln turned a funeral into a promise that the war was being fought to keep democracy itself alive.

Douglass's argument that freedom is never handed over by those in power. It has to be demanded, and the demand will be uncomfortable.

King's answer to clergymen who called him an outside agitator. Because all communities are tied together, he argued, he had every right to be in Birmingham.

Lincoln's warning that the United States could not stay half slave and half free forever. He borrowed the image from the Gospels, where Jesus uses it to answer critics.

Truth did give a famous speech for women's rights in 1851, but the refrain “Ain't I a woman?” appears only in a version published twelve years later by another activist.

A line that sums up Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence, but it has not been found in anything he wrote or said. Martin Luther King Jr. used a close version in 1958, and the 1982 film Gandhi made it famous.

Howe called on mothers everywhere to unite and refuse to let their sons be sent to kill other mothers' sons. Her Mother's Day was a day of protest for peace.

A story about an unnamed “great princess” in Rousseau's memoirs, written when Marie Antoinette was about ten years old and living in Vienna. Revolutionary-era propaganda and later writers attached it to her.

Acton's argument that historians should not excuse popes and kings because of their office. He wrote “tends to” corrupt, a qualification usually dropped.

Latin for “Who will guard the guards themselves?” Today it asks who keeps the powerful honest when they are the ones meant to keep everyone else in line.

A promise that justice wins in the long run, even when progress is slow. King's compact wording condenses a longer image from an abolitionist sermon of 1853.

One of the most quoted sayings in politics, but it does not appear in Burke's works. Burke and John Stuart Mill both wrote similar, longer thoughts.

The founding claim of the United States, drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Its authors applied it narrowly, but later generations used its own words to demand freedom and equal rights.

A line from an academic article about forgotten Puritan women. Its author meant that ordinary, dutiful women are left out of history books, not that women should misbehave.

Spoken weeks before the Civil War ended and six weeks before Lincoln was killed. He asked the winning side to heal the nation without revenge.