James M. McPhersonThis Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War (2007), Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–9 
2000s 
Context: While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states' rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle.
                                    
“For us, it is all right if the talks succeed, and it is all right if they fail.”
On President Richard Nixon’s visit to China (5 October 1971), as quoted in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988) edited by James Beasley Simpson.
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Zhou Enlai 8
1st Premier of the People's Republic of China 1898–1976Related quotes
                                        
                                        On the emphasis in the news media on the Starr investigation and the Lewinsky affair (June 22, 2004)  Panorama interview http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3829799.stm 
2000s
                                    
“All right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him.”
Fiction, Distress (1995)
                                        
                                        Letter from Batoche, N.W. T. to The Irish World (6 May 1885), also published as " An Appeal for Justice" in The Gibbet of Regina : The Truth about Riel, Sir John A. Macdonald and His Cabinet Before Public Opinion, by One who Knows (1886) by One who knows, Napoléon Thompson, p. 186 
Context: In a little while it will be all over. We may fail. But the rights for which we contend will not die. A day of reckoning will come to our enemies and of jubilee to my people. The hated yoke of English domination and arrogance will be broken in this land, and the long-suffering victims of their injustice will, with God's blessing, re-enter into the peaceful enjoyment of their possessions.
                                    
                                
                                    “Fail I alone, in words and deeds?
Why, all men strive and who succeeds?”
                                
                                
                                
                                
                            
"The Last Ride Together", line 67 (1859).
Source: Ico: Castle in the Mist
1960s, I've Been to the Mountaintop (1968)
                                        
                                        "6/24/95 Wendy Kaminer on Crime" (24 June 1995) 
Context: Not everything that appears true is true. The ACLU is devoted to some very controversial principles — like the principle that everyone who is arrested should enjoy the same constitutional rights, regardless of their alleged crime or their character. We don't take that position to irritate people; we take that position because we believe in it. We believe in it, in part, in a spirit of enlightened self-interest, because the rights of each one of us are co-extensive with the rights of everyone who is arrested and prosecuted in the criminal courts. If we all don't enjoy the same rights, then no one enjoys any rights at all; some of us merely enjoy privilege.
                                    
Financial Times, 1 October, 1976.