The Great Dissenter Quotes

“[Harlan] declared, echoing his hero Henry Clay: 'Let it be said that I am right rather than consistent.”
― Peter S. Canellos, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero

“numerical insignificance, I was wont to console myself with what seemed to many a transcendental idea, that one man with God is a majority; that if such a man does not represent what is, he does represent what ought to be, and what ultimately will”
― Peter S. Canellos, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero

“Unfettered by the Supreme Court, Jim Crow became the law of the South. When the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was announced, there were 130,334 registered Black voters in Louisiana. Eight years later, there were only 1,342.65 “Between the two dates the literacy, property, and poll tax qualifications were adopted,” wrote historian C. Vann Woodward in his 1955 book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. “In 1896, Negro registrants were in a majority in twenty-six parishes—by 1900, in none.”66”
― Peter S. Canellos, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero

“. . . Colonel Bob Harlan, of the Paris of America, commonly called Cincinnati. . .”
― Peter S. Canellos, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero

“with God to be an enhancement of his own power to discern right and wrong. He could”
― Peter S. Canellos, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero