Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dalai Lama

All beings want to live in peace and happiness, undisturbed. Therefore the concept of human rights is universal.

Dalai Lama

I'm sure all of us agree that we need to overcome violence, but we first need to examine whether it has any value. From a strictly practical perspective, on certain occasions violence appears to be useful. We can solve a problem quickly by force. But this success is often at the expense of the rights and welfare of others. Although one problem has been solved, the seed of another has been planted.

Dalai Lama

Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. True peace with oneself and with the world around us can only be achieved through the development of mental peace.

Indira Gandhi

People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.

Jack Kemp

I can't help but care about the rights of the people I used to shower with.

Jack Antonoff

As straight Americans we have two choices: we can choose to sit back and enjoy our rights as we have them, or we can realize that it is actually not freedom at all when our friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues do not share these basic rights.

Harriet Tubman

Quoting Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998) US civil rights leader We had no more courage than Harriet Tubman or Marcus Garvey had in their times. We just had a more vulnerable enemy.

Glenn Greenwald

A: Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States. But that's not his goal. [His] objective is to expose software that people around the world use without knowing what they are exposing themselves without consciously agreeing to surrender their rights to privacy. [He] has a huge number of documents that would be very harmful to the US government if they were made public.

Ginny Brown-Waite

For centuries, the world has heard the oppressed, the downtrodden and the vulnerable cry out for their freedoms, for their rights and for a chance to emerge from the shadows of the tyranny and bloodshed that they had lived with.

Ginny Brown-Waite

Since President Bush took office in 2001, this Congress has supported an agenda of democracy, freedom and expansion of rights for all peoples throughout the world.

Gerry Spence

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.

Gerry Spence

A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals' rights - which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.

Harry Browne

[Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964], many governments in southern states forced people to segregate by race. Civil rights advocates fought to repeal these state laws, but failed. So they appealed to the federal government, which responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But this federal law didn't simply repeal state laws compelling segregation. It also prohibited voluntary segregation. What had been mandatory became forbidden. Neither before nor after the Civil Rights Act were people free to make their own decisions about who they associated with.

Harold H. Greene

The Sherman Act is similar in the economics sphere to the Bill of Rights in the personal sphere.

An awful lot of people keep a stock too long because it gives them warm fuzzies – particularly when a contrarian stance has been vindicated. If they sell it, they lose bragging rights.

John Stossel

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

John Sparkman

The Civil Rights Commission should never have been brought into existence. It has been most prejudiced in its viewpoint, and has fomented trouble and racial disturbance since its inception. It should be abolished, not extended.

Mark Steyn

The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.

Nicole Kidman

One in three women may suffer from abuse and violence in her lifetime. This is an appalling human rights violation, yet it remains one of the invisible and under-recognized pandemics of our time.

Nicole Kidman

Violence against women is an appalling human rights violation. But it is not inevitable. We can put a stop to this.

Nick Lampson

Moreover, as we live in an era of the ascendancy of democracy and human rights, we must see that Taiwan has been a vibrant democracy with a democratically elected president and legislature.

Simon Wiesenthal

Human rights is the only ideology that deserves to survive

Simon Wiesenthal

Tolerance and human rights require each other.

Sojourner Truth

I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.

Socrates

The partisan when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.

Mel Watt

Judge Roberts' civil rights record and views remained the most controversial and unexplained part of his record when the Judiciary Committee hearing concluded, just as his civil rights record and views had been the most controversial part of his record when the hearing began.

Mel White

Gary Nixon and I have had a loving, committed, faithful relationship for twenty-five years (now over 30) yet we are denied more than a thousand rights and protections that go automatically with marriage.

Theodore Roosevelt

Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible - and incidentally of a highly undesirable - social revolution which, in destroying individual rights - including property rights - and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the preservation of mankind is worthwhile.

Michael Foley

The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.

Michelle Alexander

If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of mass incarceration is just too big, too daunting for us to do anything about and that we should instead direct our energies to battles that might be more easily won, history will judge us harshly. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch.

Michelle Bachelet

The respect for human rights is nowadays not so much a matter of having international standards, but rather questions of compliance with those standards.

Michele Bachmann

People were floored when they saw that the underwear bomber, after less than 50 minutes of interrogation, was given the rights, privileges, and immunities of an American citizen under the Constitution.

Michael Douglas

Human Rights for everyone is the necessary foundation upon which all of us may build a world where everybody may live in peace and serenity and plenty.