“Social protest and even civil disobedience serve the law's need for growth. Ideally, reform would come according to reason and justice without self-help and disturbing, almost violent, forms of protest. … Still, candor compels one here again to acknowledge the gap between the ideal and the reality. Short of the millennium, sharp changes in the law depend partly upon the stimulus of protest.”

— Archibald Cox

Civil Rights, the Constitution, and the Courts (1967: Harvard University Press), pp. 22–23 (40 N.Y. State B.J. 161, 169 (1968)).

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Archibald Cox 3

American prosecutor 1912–2004

Robert J. Birgeneau (1942) Canadian physicist

"Message to Campus Community" http://zungu.tumblr.com/post/12620438282/message-to-campus-community, November 10, 2011.

“The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Quoted in an interview from Hollywood Voices, ed. Andrew Sarris (1971).

“The document they produced was eventually signed, but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggles, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

“Never grow weary of protesting. In this sensitive business of dealing with the public which depends on faith and good will, protest is a most effective weapon. Therefore protest.”

George Seldes (1890–1995) American journalist

Lords of the Press.

“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"A Poem of Difficult Hope"
What Are People For? (1990)

“Their protest against injustice and oppression, to the neglect of all other social evils, is almost monotonous.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.1 The Historical Roots of Christianity the Hebrew Prophets, p. 12-13
Context: There is no question on which side the sympathy of the prophets was enlisted. Their protest against injustice and oppression, to the neglect of all other social evils, is almost monotonous.

“When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.”

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) American civil rights activist and gay rights activist

The Mirage of Dignity on the Highways of Human 'progress': - the bystanders' perspective - , by Lukman Harees, p xv, 2012.

“To close the gap between jurisprudence and justice would require a canon of a hundred million laws.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 15 (p. 383)

“I take it that the Protestant Church of Ireland is at the root of the evils of that country. The Irish Catholics would thank us infinitely more if we were to wipe away that foul blot than they would even if Parliament were to establish the Roman Catholic Church alongside of it. They have had everything Protestant—a Protestant clique which has been dominant in the country; a Protestant Viceroy to distribute places and emoluments amongst that Protestant clique; Protestant judges who have polluted the seats of justice; Protestant magistrates before whom the Catholic peasant cannot hope for justice; they have not only Protestant but exterminating landlords, and more than that a Protestant soldiery, who at the beck and command of a Protestant priest, have butchered and killed a Catholic peasant even in the presence of his widowed mother. The consequence of all this is the extreme discontent of the Irish people. And because this House is not prepared yet to take those measures which would be really doing justice to Ireland, your object is to take away the sympathy of the Catholic priests from the people. The object is to make the priests in Ireland as tame as those in Suffolk and Dorsetshire. The object is that when the horizon is brightened every night by incendiary fires, no priest of the paid establishment shall ever tell of the wrongs of the people among whom he is living…Ireland is suffering, not from the want of another Church, but because she has already one Church too many.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (16 April 1845) against the Maynooth grant, quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 161-162.
1840s

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