Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gary Clark, Jr.

For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression.

Friedrich August von Hayek

While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

Jacob Zuma

You have fewer rights because you are a minority. Absolutely, that’s how democracy works.

Henry Rollins

For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.

Malcolm X

They came up with a civil rights bill in 1964, supposedly to solve our problem, and after the bill was signed, three civil rights workers were murdered in cold blood. And the FBI head, Hoover, admits that they know who did it, they've known ever since it happened, and they've done nothing about it. Civil rights bill down the drain.

Malcolm X

Whenever you're going after something that belongs to you, anyone who's depriving you of the right to have it is a criminal. Understand that. Whenever you are going after something that is yours, you are within your legal rights to lay claim to it. And anyone who puts forth any effort to deprive you of that which is yours, is breaking the law, is a criminal.

Malcolm X

The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.

Malcolm X

Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth.

Malcolm X

You spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don't even know there's a human-rights tree on the same floor.

Malcolm X

Any time you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the World Court and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it is guilty of today.

Mahatma Gandhi

If all simply insist on rights and no duties, there will be utter confusion and chaos.

Mahatma Gandhi

Rights of true citizenship accrue only to those who serve the State to which they belong.

Mahatma Gandhi

No people have risen who thought only of rights. Only those did so who thought of duties.

Mahatma Gandhi

If we all discharge our duties, rights will not be far to seek.

Mahatma Gandhi

The true source of rights is duty.

Mahatma Gandhi

Out of the performance of duties flow rights, and those that knew and performed their duties came naturally by their rights.

Mahatma Gandhi

Violence becomes imperative when an attempt is made to assert rights without any reference to duties.

Mahatma Gandhi

The meticulous care for the rights of the least among us is the sin qua non of nonviolence.

Johannes Rau

A hundred years ago, when Richard Strauss, who has already been quoted and already been heard today, and other creative people, laid the foundation stone for the joint assertion of their rights and interests, they had pioneering work ahead of them in Germany.

James Connolly

There can be no perfect Europe in which Ireland is denied even the least of its national rights.

Jacques Maritain

The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The function of Government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator's power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.

Joichi Ito

It would be easy to define terrorism as attacks against human rights and international humanitarian law forbids attacks against innocent non-combatants which is often the definition used for terrorism.

Joichi Ito

Liberty, freedom and democracy are very fuzzy words, but human rights is very specific.

Joichi Ito

If we destroy human rights and rule of law in response to terrorism, they have won.

John Bruton

The E.U. is more than just a trade organization or a common market; it is a guarantee of democracy, freedom, justice, and human rights. Nations cannot stay in the E.U. if they do not respect these guarantees.

Luis Gutierrez

The next step has to be the necessary step. It's always to put the immigrant community and the civil rights movement ahead of partisan politics.

John Charles Polanyi

Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.

John Boyle O'Reilly

The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity.

Ray McGovern

Our bill of rights has been shredded. The fourth amendment specifically prohibits the kind of activities the NSA is involved in domestically. The fifth amendment prohibits any president or anyone else from killing anyone without due process.

Ray McGovern

I would say that not many German people are still alive, who experienced what happened during the third reich. We don't have to go to the Stasi, we can go to the Gestapo, and see what happens, when your human rights, your ability to a freedom of expression and a freedom of thought is infringed upon. This is terribly, terribly dangerous territory.