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• The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.
  • Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies, p. 328

• The story of the labor movement needs to be taught in every school in this land... America is a living testimonial to what free men and women, organized in free democratic trade unions can do to make a better life ... we ought to be proud of it!
  • 1977 Minnesota State AFL-CIO Convention

Address to the Democratic National Convention (1948)

• We can't use a double standard — there’s no room for double standards in American politics — for measuring our own and other people's policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantee of those practices in our own country.

• To those who say — My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say — To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

• For all of us here, for the millions who have sent us, for the whole two billion members of the human family, our land is now, more than ever before, the last best hope on earth. And I know that we can, and I know that we shall began [sic] here the fuller and richer realization of that hope — that promise of a land where all men are truly free and equal, and each man uses his freedom and equality wisely well.

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• A society will be judged on how it treats those in the dawn of life, those in the twilight of life, and those in the shadow of life.

• [At university] I had no money to buy books ,so ... I even tutored in French with a sliding scale of payment: twenty dollars for an A, fifteen for a B, ten for a C, and five for a D. From : The Education Of A Public Man by Hubert Humphrey {Doubleday 1976} page 43

• In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.

• It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

• The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

• What you do, what each of us does, has an effect on the country, the state, the nation, and the world.