“Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.”

—  Thurgood Marshall

Speech at the national convention of Alpha Phi Alpha, St. Louis, Missouri, August 15, 1966, as reported by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 17, 1966, p. 1.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for eith…" by Thurgood Marshall?
Thurgood Marshall photo
Thurgood Marshall 11
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court 1908–1993

Related quotes

Isocrates photo

“Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.”

Isocrates (-436–-338 BC) ancient greek rhetorician

A falsified quote invented during the 2010 financial crisis. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Isoc.+7+20&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0144 Isocrates' actual, more nuanced, quote runs as follows:
Those who directed the state in the time of Solon and Cleisthenes did not establish a polity which … trained the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and licence to do what they pleased as happiness, but rather a polity which detested and punished such men and by so doing made all the citizens better and wiser.
Areopagiticus, 7.20 (Norlin)
Misattributed

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker photo

“The idea that Anarchy can be inaugurated by force is as fallacious as the idea that it can be sustained by force. Force cannot preserve Anarchy; neither can it bring it.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Passive Resistance
Context: The idea that Anarchy can be inaugurated by force is as fallacious as the idea that it can be sustained by force. Force cannot preserve Anarchy; neither can it bring it. In fact, one of the inevitable influences of the use of force is to postpone Anarchy. The only thing that force can ever do for us is to save us from extinction, to give us a longer lease of life in which to try to secure Anarchy by the only methods that can ever bring it. But this advantage is always purchased at immense cost, and its attainment is always attended by frightful risk. The attempt should be made only when the risk of any other course is greater.

Kenneth N. Waltz photo

“In anarchy there is no automatic harmony.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter VI, The Third Image, p. 160

Leo Tolstoy photo

“The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. "To establish Anarchy." "Anarchy will be instituted."”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require protection from governmental power, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.
"On Anarchy", in Pamphlets : Translated from the Russian (1900) as translated by Aylmer Maude, p. 22

Robert H. Jackson photo

“The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

Dissenting in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949); this has sometimes been paraphrased as The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.
Judicial opinions
Context: The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

Dan Brown photo

“The media is the right arm of anarchy.”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

Jacques Ellul photo

“This is why I decide for anarchy.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Ethics of Freedom (1973 - 1974), p. 396
Context: Every modern state is totalitarian. It recognizes no limit either factual or legal. This is why I maintain that no state in the modern world is legitimate. No present-day authority can claim to be instructed by God, for all authority is set in the framework of a totalitarian state. This is why I decide for anarchy.

Ernst Jünger photo

“Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy.”

Ernst Jünger book Eumeswil

Eumeswil (1977)

Michele Bachmann photo

“We're in a state of crisis where our nation is literally ripping apart at the seams right now, and lawlessness is occurring from one ocean to the other. And we're seeing the fulfillment of the Book of Judges here in our own time, where every man doing that which is right in his own eyes—in other words, anarchy.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

2000s

“The real struggle is between order and anarchy.”

Edmund Cooper book All Fools' Day

All Fools' Day (1966)

Related topics