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“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”
Douglass exposes the exclusion within a national celebration of liberty when enslaved people are denied the freedom and rights being publicly commemorated.
Source note: Speech delivered at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852. Douglass contrasts the audience’s national independence with the condition of enslaved Black Americans; the line is part of an abolitionist indictment, not generic commentary on patriotism.
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“I contend for the rights of men and the liberty of reason.”
The line joins political rights with intellectual liberty: the argument is not merely for a different ruler but for people’s capacity to reason without inherited deference.
Source note: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, opening letter to Edmund Burke; Wollstonecraft frames the pamphlet as a defense of human rights and the liberty of reason.
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“Society in equality is its normal state.”
Mill contrasts relations organized around command and obedience with equal association, presenting equality as the normal direction of an improving society.
Source note: The Subjection of Women, discussion of marriage and moral cultivation; the sentence follows Mill’s contrast between older command-and-obedience relations and society among equals.
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“The a priori presumption is in favour of freedom and impartiality.”
Mill places the burden of proof on restrictions and unequal privilege rather than treating inherited inequality as self-justifying.
Source note: The Subjection of Women, Chapter I; the line appears in Mill’s argument about where the burden of proof should fall when liberty or equal treatment is restricted.
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“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
Du Bois identifies racial division and unequal relations between darker and lighter peoples as a defining political and social problem of his century.
Source note: The Souls of Black Folk, Forethought and repeated later in the book. The phrase is a historical diagnosis of racism, segregation and the aftermath of slavery, not a generic statement about interpersonal difference.
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“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”
Thoreau distinguishes legality from moral rightness, warning that habitual reverence for law can become dangerous when law and conscience point in opposing directions.
Source note: Civil Disobedience, first printed in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil Government”; represented Wikisource text. The surrounding paragraph asks whether citizens should resign conscience to legislators.