(439 quotes found)
“Whatever career you may choose for yourself - doctor, lawyer, teacher - let me propose an avocation to be pursued along with it. Become a dedicated fighter for civil rights. Make it a central part of your life. It will make you a better doctor, a better lawyer, a better teacher. It will enrich your spirit as nothing else possibly can. It will give you that rare sense of nobility that can only spring from love and selflessly helping your fellow man. Make a career of humanity.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.
“Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.”
Kofi Annan
“For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.”
Jimmy Carter
“If we destroy human rights and rule of law in the response to terrorism, they have won.”
Joichi Ito
“To me, a feminist belongs in the same category as a humanist or an advocate for human rights. I don't see why someone who's a feminist should be thought of differently.”
Suzanne Vega
“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war and until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained... now everywhere is war.”
Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia
“Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail”
Abraham Lincoln
“America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America.”
“Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.”
Imelda Marcos
“Those religions that are oppressive to women are also against democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.”
Taslima Nasrin