These forces should be adequate to help meet the rights of citizens to walk peaceably and safely without injury or loss of life from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama,

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman... They are both... lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.

[The day the Senate passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the party leaders placed a call to the White House to report the good news.] You must have made a hell of a speech out there today, ... We are proud.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter - and to write it in the books of law.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

The guns and bombs, the rockets and the warships, all are symbols of human failure.