Human Rights Quotes - Page 12

• All I want to be is human and American and have all the same rights and I will shut up.

  Martha Griffiths

  Rights, Want, Shut Up

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• Economic dynamism can be combined with environmental and social responsibility. High financial returns can go hand in hand with respect for human rights, and the preservation of the planet's natural resources

  David Miliband

  Business, Responsibility, Rights

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• In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.

  Jane Goodall

  Kindness, Thinking, Rights

  "The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity". Book by Paola Cavalieri, Peter Singer, 1996.

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• I refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state - a new idea, this - even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms.

  Boris Yeltsin

  Rights, Ideas, Affair

  Boris Yeltsin's speech to the summit of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Istanbul, news.bbc.co.uk. November 18, 1999.

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• I am against revolution and am proud of it. Democracy cannot be created through revolutions. The most important dichotomy that I make for a society is between those who support democracy and human rights, and those who oppose it. In a totalitarian state, the state views any act of an individual to be political in nature. For example, the clothing that a person wears in a modern state is a private affair whereas in the Islamic Republic all women are forced to wear the hijab (Islamic attire). When women push their headscarf back an inch or two, this is interpreted to be a political act.

  Akbar Ganji

  Islamic, Rights, Views

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• Women and gay people are the litmus test of whether a society is democratic and respecting human rights. We are the canaries in the mine.

  Peter Tatchell

  Gay, Rights, People

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• Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds.

  George Mason

  Infancy Is, Rights, Mind

  Extracts from the Virginia Charters written by George Mason, July 1773.

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• We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act... about the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because, and I am not making this up, he had a pet cat.

  Theresa May

  Cat, Rights, Pet

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Rights, Long, People

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• Economic and military power can be developed under the spur of laws and appropriations. But moral power does not derive from any act of Congress. It depends on the relations of a people to their God. It is the churches to which we must look to develop the resources for the great moral offensive that is required to make human rights secure, and to win a just and lasting peace.

  John Foster Dulles

  Peace, Military, Winning

  John Foster Dulles (1960). “The Spiritual Legacy of John Foster Dulles: Selections from His Articles and Addresses”, Philadelphia : Westminister Press

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• When we get the remote Russian village online, what will get people to the Internet is not going to be reports from Human Rights Watch. It's going to be pornography, 'Sex and the City,' or maybe funny videos of cats.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Sex, Cat, Cities

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• More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright, not some imported American privilege.

  Michael Anti

  Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Chinese

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• Refugee problems may often seem intractable but they are not insoluble. In our experience there are two basic prerequisites for solution: the political will of leaders to tackle the causes and to settle for peace, and international determination to push for peace and then to consolidate it. Consolidating peace means helping societies emerging from war to reintegrate refugees in safety and dignity, to rebuild their institutions - including in the field of justice and human rights - and to resume their economic development.

  Sadako Ogata

  Determination, War, Mean

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• Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world ... Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Inspiring, Children, Home

  Eleanor Roosevelt, Allida Mae Black (2013). “Courage in a Dangerous World: The Political Writings of Eleanor Roosevelt”, p.190, Columbia University Press

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• I love life and want to hold onto it. But my passion for justice for my tormented people, for their dignity and freedom, must be greater still. For of what value is a life of slavery, of humiliation and contempt for that which you hold most dear: Your identity! I will therefore not give in to the Turkish Inquisition.

  Leyla Zana

  Passion, Love Life, People

  Leyla Zana (1999). “Writings from Prison”

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• Just because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education and proper nutrition.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Education, Children, Rights

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• Basically we could not have peace, or an atmosphere in which peace could grow, unless we recognized the rights of individual human beings... their importance, their dignity... and agreed that was the basic thing that had to be accepted throughout the world.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Acceptance, Rights, Atmosphere

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• When we struggle for human rights, for freedom, for dignity, when we feel that it is a ministry of the church to concern itself for those who are hungry, for those who have no schools, for those who are deprived, we are not departing from God's promise. He comes to free us from sin, and the church knows that sin's consequences are all such injustices and abuses. The church knows it is saving the world when it undertakes to speak also of such things.

  Oscar Romero

  Christian, Inspiration, Struggle

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• Human rights, human freedoms... and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world... while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.

  Vaclav Havel

  Powerful, Patriotic, Rights

  "Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism" by Slavoj Zizek in London Review of Books, Volume 21, No. 21 (pp. 3-6), www.lrb.co.uk. October 28, 1999.

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• Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death?

  Eugene V. Debs

  Brother, Children, Helping Others

  "The Issue". Eugene V. Debs' speech in Girard, Kansas, May 23, 1908.

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• Like being a woman, like being a racial religious tribal or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.

  Hillary Clinton

  Religious, Gay, Rights

  International Human Rights Day Address at Palais des Nations, delivered 6 December 2011, Geneva, Switzerland

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• When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

  James A. Baldwin

  Rights, Order, Revolution

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• Let it never be said by future generations that indifference, cynicism or selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideals of humanism which the Nobel Peace Prize encapsulates. Let the strivings of us all, prove Martin Luther King Jr. to have been correct, when he said that humanity can no longer be tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war.

  Nelson Mandela

  Kings, Selfish, War

  FaceBook post by Nelson Mandela from Aug 28, 2013

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• The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century... unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today.

  John F. Kennedy

  Gay, Rights, Today

  Inaugural address, 20 Jan. 1961, in Vital Speeches 1 Feb. 1961, p. 226

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• This moon man right here stands for a lot more. This is the most important record out of all of them. Gay rights are human rights, there is no separation.

  Macklemore

  Gay, Moon, Men

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