Justice & Law Quote by Robert G. Ingersoll

A lawyer-turned-lecturer famous for skewering pieties, Robert G. Ingersoll flips the era's usual hierarchy: status isn’t earned by birth, wealth, or even virtue-signaling respectability, but forfeited the moment you violate someone else’s rights. The line’s sting is in its inversion. In a century that routinely treated "inferiors" as a natural category - immigrants, workers, Black Americans, women - Ingersoll insists inferiority is not a trait of the oppressed. It’s the moral condition of the oppressor.

The phrasing is deliberately physical: "trample under foot" conjures not abstract policy but the bodily reality of domination - the boot, the crowd, the law used as weight. Then comes the clean legal pivot: "rights". Ingersoll, trained in the language of claims and limits, makes rights the non-negotiable baseline of human rank. You can almost hear him cross-examining the self-satisfied citizen: if your comfort depends on someone else’s dispossession, what exactly are you proud of?

The subtext is also a rebuke to the prevailing logic of paternalism. Many 19th-century reformers opposed cruelty while still imagining themselves above those they "helped". Ingersoll refuses that loophole. He doesn’t ask for sympathy; he demands equality as a condition of self-respect. It’s a shrewd rhetorical trap: if you want to think well of yourself, you have to stop stepping on people.