Human Rights Day Quotes

Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities. ~ Pope Francis

We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come. ~ Barbara Jordan

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else's children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose. ~ Aberjhani

Human rights is the only ideology that deserves to survive ~ Simon Wiesenthal

So on this Human Rights Day, let us rededicate ourselves to the advancement of human rights and freedoms for all, and pledge always to live by the ideals we promote to the world. ~ Barack Obama

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. ~ George Ryan

As life in general constituted much pain in the form of struggles against poverty, disease, ignorance, and emotional anguish, what more civilized way for people to alleviate the same than by giving themselves to one another as brothers and sisters in deed as well as in word? A society of people hoping to become politically superior needed first to become spiritually valid. ~ Aberjhani

Tolerance and human rights require each other. ~ Simon Wiesenthal

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. ~ Michael Douglas

The connection between women's human rights, gender equality, socioeconomic development and peace is increasingly apparent. ~ Mahnaz Afkhami

Commit yourself to the noble struggle for human rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country and a finer world to live in. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society. ~ Anne Lamott

No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law. ~ Michelle Alexander

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not - Heaven help us _ all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone...Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another. But it is not altogether plain sailing either...these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled up on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own...so that one will only come if it is raining....another if you can promise it a glass of wine - and so on... ~ Virginia Woolf

Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature's gift and denies the poor of their human rights. ~ Vandana Shiva

Until we align our minds with our souls,
we will continue to grieve for our highest selves as individuals, a society, and as a world family. ~ Leta B.

The declaration of rights [Bill of Rights] is, like all other human blessings, alloyed with some inconveniences and not accomplishing fully its object. But the good in this instance vastly outweighs the evil. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not, the Western conception of human rights is really about the practices of other states--but never our own. One reason Western people have adopted this worldview is that it tends to make us look good. But another possible reason might be that our 'wrongs' might not be 'international wrongs' after all. ~ Mark Gibney

It is my view that it is a big embarrassment for Africa . It is hypocritical for African leaders to talk about democracy and human rights and to be silent when these things are happening in Zimbabwe . ~ Raila Odinga

I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon earth. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

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 Alexander

The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable. ~ Thomas More

Ivy just had to look at him to know that Dean Bennet would never look at her. He was the kind of guy who dated flamenco dancers or famous actresses or multi-lingual international human rights lawyers. Not sheltered little daddy's girls who could barely look at him without turning red. ~ Amy Andrews

Let's be grateful to all those who came in before us. Grateful to all those men and women, young and old alike, who paved the path forward for us, brick by brick. To those men and women who marched across the bridge in Selma on that great day, those men and women who rallied behind the Gandhis and the Mandelas every single time they were needed, to those men and women who stood up for voting rights and civil rights and gay rights and equality and justice and a free world, those men and women who invented the future by inventing things that fundamentally changed the world from the electricity to vaccinations, from airplanes to birth control pills, from the printing press to the internet. ~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

It seems clear to me that the Obama Administration has no human rights policy. That is, while in some inchoate sense they would like respect for human rights to grow around the world, as all Americans would, they have no actual policy to achieve that goal - and they subordinate it to all their other policy goals. ~ Elliott Abrams

May you have the courage to choose love over hate. ~ Leta B.

Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses. ~ Naomi Klein

This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many. ~ Barack Obama

Every man - in the development of his own personality - has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man's essential nature.
[Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)] ~ Thomas I. Emerson

In the struggle for the rights of the poor in Central America and other places where globalization is bringing its negative effects, there is no organization more effective than the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights. ~ Thomas Gumbleton

The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. I don't find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason. ~ Steven Pinker

The movement for nuclear weapons free world needs leadership from all parts of the world. It needs to go right at the top of the UN's agenda. Nuclear weapons are the ugliest threat to the humanity itself. ~ Amit Ray

The communications revolution has given millions of people both a wider and more detailed understanding of the world. Because of technology, ordinary citizens enjoy access to information that formerly was available only to elites and nation-states. One consequence of this change is that citizens have become acutely conscious of environmental destruction, entrenched poverty, health catastrophes, human rights abuses, failing education systems, and escalating violence. Another consequence is that people possess powerful communication tools to coordinate efforts to attack those problems. ~ David Bornstein

Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean? ... in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid. ~ Marisha Pessl

Bigotry, hate, bullying, perversion and discrimination must never be considered to be human rights, because if we do, then we will never in a million years be able to instill real justice, equality and acceptance in the human society. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come. ~ Albert Schweitzer

Often people who already had an interest in human rights work. What I did notice with all of them, even the people who professed to be interested in human rights, was that activism was somewhat a concept in their mind - a symbolic flag on the quad or something to show how many people were starving in the world. But once they saw their efforts connected to a person, I did see a change. ~ Adam Braver

Our defense of universal human rights is one of America's greatest sources of strength. The image of Chen, blind and injured, seeking through that dangerous night for the one place he knew stood for freedom and opportunity - the embassy of the United States - reminds us of our responsibility to make sure our country remains the beacon for dissidents and dreamers all over the world. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Our men and women fighting in Iraq are held accountable for their performance and their conduct. On duty and off, twenty-four hours a day. They're fighting for us, for our safety, our rights, and our freedoms. ~ Wesley Clark

The world needs madness, a madness for justice, a madness for harmony, a madness for equality, a madness for humanitarian glory. If everyone had the madness for doing good, there wouldn't be any misery in the world. So, be mad, be furious, be rebellious towards every bit of misery, inequality and injustice in the world. Remember, every injustice anywhere in the world is your business, every misery anywhere in the world is your business, every segregation anywhere in the world is your business. Human condition anywhere in the world is your business. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolate. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture. ~ William Blackstone

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. ~ Francisco Jimenez

Tanzania is standing by the people of Zimbabwe including President Mugabe ... Mugabe is there, he is president, he has been elected. If Tanzania had simply said, stupid, you're hopeless, a murderer, a violator of basic human rights; does that remove Mugabe from office? It doesn't. ~ Jakaya Kikwete

When most people use the word 'freedom' nowadays, they use it in the sense of the French Revolutionaries: freedom from tradition, from established social institutions, from religious doctrines, from prescriptive duties. I think that this employment of the word does much mischief. For we do not live in an age - and there are such ages - which is oppressed by the dead weight of archaic establishments and obsolete custom. The danger in our era, rather, is that the fountains of the great deep will be broken up and that the pace of alteration will be so rapid that generation cannot link with generation. Our era, necessarily, is what Matthew Arnold called an epoch of concentration. Or, at least, the thinking American needs to turn his talents to concentration, the buttressing and reconstruction of our moral and social heritage. This is a time not for anarchic freedom, but for ordered freedom. There are much older and stronger concepts of freedom than that espoused by the French Revolutionaries. In the Christian tradition, freedom is submission to the will of God. This is no paradox. As he that would save his life must lose it, so the man who desires true freedom must recognize a providential order which gives all freedoms their sanction. The theory of 'natural rights' depends upon the premise of an on alterable human nature bestowed upon man by God. Only acceptance of the divine order can give enduring freedom to a society; for this lacking, there is no reason why the strong and th ~ Russell Kirk

Women have to work much harder to make it in this world. It really pisses me off that women don't get the same opportunities as men do, or money for that matter. Because lets face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define our values and to define what's sexy and what's feminine and that's bullshit. At the end of the day, it's not about equal rights, it's about how we think. We have to reshape our own perception of how we view ourselves. ~ Beyonce Knowles