“These activities are so basically wrong and so menacing to our institutions that every citizen and particularly every public official should oppose them to the limit of their strength.”

—  Earl Warren

Views on civil rights declared in a written statement requested by Robert W. Kenny, read during fund raising luncheon at the Biltmore Hotel, in Los Angeles, in the summer of 1938, quoted in Lawyers Guild Review Vol. 13-14 (1953), p. 47; he mentions Frank Hague, who had declared earlier in the year:
Context: I believe the preservation of our civil liberties to be the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems, because it always has been with us and always will be with us and if we ever permit those liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation. They constitute the soul of democracy. I believe that there is grave danger in this country of losing our civil liberties as they have been lost in other countries. There are things transpiring in this country today that are definitely menacing our future; among which are the activities of Mayor Hague and other little Hagues throughout the country. These activities are so basically wrong and so menacing to our institutions that every citizen and particularly every public official should oppose them to the limit of their strength.

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Earl Warren 31
United States federal judge 1891–1974

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