Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry Louis Gates

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.

Before our contract, we had no rights whatsoever and no security whatsoever.

Friedrich Nietzsche

no one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any

Friedrich Nietzsche

This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights.

Franz Grillparzer

Right and proof are two crutches for everything bent and crooked that limps along.

Franz Grillparzer

Finally and long overdue, your people, oppressed and disgraced by hatred and maliciousness, have achieved justice: now you enjoy full citizen's rights, but you'll remain Jews nonetheless.

Jim Costa

The civil rights movement would experience many important victories, but Rosa Parks will always be remembered as its catalyst.

Georges Bernanos

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Jefferson Davis

How idle is this prating about natural rights as though still containing all that had been forfeited.

Jean Racine

Small crimes always precede great crimes. Whoever has been able to transgress the limits set by law may afterwards violate the most sacred rights; crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness.

George Bernard Shaw

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

Erica Jong

We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.

Elton Gallegly

Since achieving their independence in 1992, the people of Croatia have built a democratic society based on the rule of law, respect for human rights, and a free market economy.

Elvis Costello

Even in a perfect world, where everyone was equal I'd still own the film rights and be working on the sequal

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.

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.

Babatunde Osotimehin

Sexual and reproductive health and rights are universal human rights!They are an indivisible part of the broader human rights and development equation. Their particular power resides in the fact that they deal with the most intimate aspects of our identities as individuals and enable human dignity, which is dependent on control of our bodies, desires and aspirations.

B. R. Ambedkar

What are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality, discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights.

Bill Delahunt

If we're going to preach about democracy we're going to have to make difficult decisions. We're not going to sell our values out for basing rights, particularly when (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld himself noted that there were options to the base in Uzbekistan

Bianca Jagger

George W. Bush and his administration embarked on a full-scale assault on civil liberties, human rights and the rule of law, walking away from his international obligations, tearing up international treaties, protocols and UN conventions.

Bianca Jagger

I am not just a celebrity, I'm a human-rights advocate for the last 20 years.

Bianca Jagger

There is so much each one of us can do to make a difference. We are at a dangerous juncture in the history of mankind. ... We need to defend our principles and values, human rights, civil liberties and the rule of international law. If we don't our world will further descend into a state of chaos.

Bertha von Suttner

One of the eternal truths is that happiness is created and developed in peace, and one of the eternal rights is the individual's right to live.

Carl Sagan

The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.