“There are daily acts of violence to the general public and in all levels of government we have witnessed corrupt practices of bribery, extortion, misuse of public funds, abuse of office and all the pervasive singling out of one race. But in reality, to use it as an excuse so that a select few will benefit in wealth and position.”

1963, Address at Vanderbilt University

Speech (13 February 1835)
1830s

Inaugural address (1889)
Context: There is no constitutional or legal requirement that the President shall take the oath of office in the presence of the people, but there is so manifest an appropriateness in the public induction to office of the chief executive officer of the nation that from the beginning of the Government the people, to whose service the official oath consecrates the officer, have been called to witness the solemn ceremonial. The oath taken in the presence of the people becomes a mutual covenant. The officer covenants to serve the whole body of the people by a faithful execution of the laws, so that they may be the unfailing defense and security of those who respect and observe them, and that neither wealth, station, nor the power of combinations shall be able to evade their just penalties or to wrest them from a beneficent public purpose to serve the ends of cruelty or selfishness.

Source: Speech at a Republican Banquet, Chicago, Illinois, December 10, 1856 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:413?rgn=div1;view=fulltext; see Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 532

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 241.

Video commentary featured on website of the Chicago Public Education Fund http://www.cpef.org/nm_video.htm#

Statement to a reporter in the Boston Record, 14 April 1903. (quoted in Alpheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man's Life (1946), p. 122.)
Commonly paraphrased as "The most important office is that of the private citizen" or "The most important political office is that of the private citizen", and sometimes misattributed to his dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States.
Extra-judicial writings

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Context: There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done. We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.

First Inaugural Address (4 March 1829).
1820s