Human Rights Quotes - Page 5

Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people who have no intelligent knowledge of what they condemn?

Your worst enemy is not the person in opposition to you. It is the person occupying the spot you would be fighting from and doing nothing.

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND THANK EVERYONEWHO TRIES TO MAKEA DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVESOF VULNERABLE CIVILIANS

Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance; the distinctions of rich, and poor, may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh, ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice.

It is character that should be the sole measure of judgement in the society of thinking humanity, and nothing short of that would do.

Human Rights directs my path"~ ~ Minnie Estelle Miller 2011

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.

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE... AND BEG EVERYONE... TO HELP RESCUE ALL IMPRISONED WOMEN.

In its essence, Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is one citizen’s soul-searing plea with his countrymen––Whites and Blacks––to recognize that racial disparities fueled by unwarranted bigotry were crippling America’s ability to shine as a true beacon of democracy in a world filled with people groping their way through suffocating shadows of political turmoil, economic oppression, military mayhem, starvation, and disease.

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.

THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age.Beyond this, there was another implication of which the framers of the declaration were only half aware. The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society.

I thought society would do the right thing. Now I look around and I think -- society never does the right thing. Sometimes people do the right thing. Sometimes one person makes a difference. But civilization has rules, and I've learned them well -- never be helpless, never be sick, never be poor.

It must be instilled in man that ‘peace’ is the best legacy we would leave behind for the generations to come, as we practice and follow the edicts of human rights.

Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International, with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opinion is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina and Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx.

How can you put human rights to a popular vote and call it democracy? How many times do you need to redefine or haggle about the meaning of the word EQUALITY?

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

Human rights violations are nit accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.

Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just "human rights," and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.

At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argen

I note the lengths to which Christianist groups are prepared to go to, to influence government and to network hate-churches in order to get their way and to rob people of their human rights, and it gives me cold chills.

Standing against discrimination for some while supporting discrimination against others hurts us all.

It is the purpose of government to see that not only the legitimate interests of the few are protected but that the welfare and rights of the many are conserved.

Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red.

To be 'for animals' is not to be 'against humanity.' To require others to treat animals justly, as their rights require, is not to ask for anything more nor less in their case than in the case of any human to whom just treatment is due. The animal rights movement is a part of, not opposed to, the human rights movement. Attempts to dismiss it as anti human are mere rhetoric.

Every attempt through history to limit the definition of humanity has been a prelude to the subjugation, degradation, and slaughter of innocents.

All those who prefer peace to power, and happiness to glory should thank the colonized people for their civilizing mission. By liberating themselves, they made Europeans more modest, less racist, and more human. Let us hope that the process continues and that the Americans are obliged to follow the same course. When one’s own cause is unjust, defeat can be liberating.

Human rights protection laws typically come under attack from those who made these laws necessary to begin with.

[A] woman should have every honorable motive to exertion which is enjoyed by man, to the full extent of her capacities and endowments. The case is too plain for argument. Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence.

Those who deny any group of people human rights are really denying the humanity of that group - and their own.

The simple truth is that every human being should be born with basic human rights without suffering from discrimination.

Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights was not that it took liberty away (which can happen in many other situations), but that it excluded a certain category of people even from the possibility of fighting for freedom—a fight possible under tyranny, and even under the desperate conditions of modern terror (but not under any conditions of concentration-camp life). Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were "born" free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature. Yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society—more than the abstract nakedness of beig human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.

We’re currently faced with two entirely different challenges – facing down Islamism and jihadism on the one hand, and advancing human rights and democratic culture on the other.

Look at yourselves. Some of you teenagers, students. How do you think I feel and I belong to a generation ahead of you - how do you think I feel to have to tell you, 'We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its human rights - and you've got to be born into a society where you still have that same fight.' What did we do, who preceded you? I'll tell you what we did. Nothing. And don't you make the same mistake we made....

It is time to recognize the past and ongoing genocides to prevent new ones. Together we can build a better world!

Often, then, the stories came pouring out, and often they were set before us slowly and quietly like tea. These slow stories were told with understatement that made my eyes and voice fill as I translated; for when people seem to have no emotion remaining for such stories, your own heart must supply it.

I will follow anyone... and remind everyone... that their fear is genuine.

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon.

Let the world feel your compassion: Help save kidnapped Yazidi females!

But *why* do clean torture and democracy appear to go hand in hand? This is an important puzzle (though by no means the only one suggested by the data). My explanation for this pattern generally is this: Public monitoring leads institutions that favor painful coercion to use and combine clean torture techniques to evade detection, and, to the extent that public monitoring is not only greater in democracies, but that public monitoring of human rights is a core value in modern democracies, it is the case that where we find democracies torturing today we will also be more likely to find stealthy torture.

The religious right sees every group trying to achieve equality with them as a threat, because if they become equal to them, THEY won't be able to abuse their human rights anymore. Giving other people equality WITH THEM, in their minds takes something away from THEM - POWER - and that TERRIFIES them. It scares them shitless.

We huddle tightly together as cowards, protecting the ranks of our false collective identity from "less-human" intruders, when the only obvious and sane truth is that we are all the same human beings.

We have laws about human rights in place for a reason and even if those laws are so often not enforced BY the law, these laws teach us our rights as human beings. I was shocked when I first discovered them, but at the same time I found them empowering; especially the ones about emotional abuse and neglect. Always remember that we are healing from the damage and that before the damage can be overcome, it has to be acknowledged.Acceptance in the context of accepting what happened is not the same thing as acceptance of the person who did it. Accepting the way a person “is” does not apply when abuse or mistreatment is involved. There is a big difference in accepting someone’s “faults”, verses accepting abusive treatment.

All men should be feminists. If men care about women’s rights the world will be a better place. We are better off when women are empowered – it leads to a better society.

To cheapen the lives of any group of men, cheapens the lives of all men, even our own. This is a law of human psychology, or human nature. And it will not be repealed by our wishes, nor will it be merciful to our blindness.

Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological.

By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.

Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something you had a right to.

Every second you spend holding someone else back is time not running the race yourself.

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.

They talk about human rights until the rights include things they personally do not like as alternatives. There needs to be Frank discussions. And Shirley can join too because the pun works. The ideas of human beings of all demeanor and venues are at stake here.

Thus there is a need for analogical process of deduction of laws and rules in the decision making process by the UN at this juncture, where the world is facing innumerable human rights violation (reported and unreported) pretermitting antithetical implementation of what each nation or any disputing party understands, in its own misinterpreted version of international laws. There is a need for world comity.

You can control the visibility of my name and my popularity, but you cannot control the frequency at which people are quoting me. Truth always rises with time.

SHOW THE WORLD YOUR STRONG COMPASSION: GIVE YOUR VOICE TO VOICELESS YAZIDI GIRLS!

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE...AND BEG EVERYONE...TO BE A HERO... AND SAVE THE YAZIDI NATION

You have a chance to save lives! If you don't take it, you may regret it!

Unfortunately Women these days, complain A LOT about "wanting" to be equal to men, and insist that they "are" equal to men. However, when it comes to paying the check at the restaurant, paying for the wedding, or handling any other expenses, suddenly they forget the whole equality phenomenon. If you ask women why, they will just tell you that "I was with a MAN, a real man doesn't let a woman touch her purse, a real man takes care of his lady"... ((So they know the difference between a "Man" and a "Woman"... ))- Man spends, man takes responsibility, man has control...- Woman gets taken care of, women expects man to take responsibility, woman is under control!If you are a woman who "WANTS" to be equal to men, if you are a woman who wants to be "IN CONTROL" rather than being "UNDER CONTROL", start by being equal in doing the hard things first, don't let your boyfriend pay when you go out with him for a year or two, just like he did for you, don't let him pick you up at your home, drive everyday and pick him up to go out for a year or two, if you think it's so hard to do so, keep quite about it... you're not ready to be equal... You're just adequate enough to be taken care of... to be spent for...

If we want truth and justice to rule our global village, there must be no hypocrisy. If there is no truth, then there will be no equality. No equality, no justice. No justice, no peace. No peace, no love. No love, only darkness.

It would seem that the right to equality and human rights is far more an exclusive thing than an inclusive thing.

The religious right sees every group trying to achieve equality with them as a threat, because obviously if they become equal to them, THEY won't be able to abuse their human rights anymore.

We must dilute and disperse all forms of concentrated power that refuse to be accountable to majority wishes.