Best 292 quotes in «civil rights quotes» category

Only a "dry as dust" religion prompts a minister to extol the glories of Heaven while ignoring the social conditions that cause men an Earthly hell.

Only until all human beings begin to recognize themselves as human beings will prejudice be gone forever. People ask me what race I am, but there is no such thing as race. I just answer: "I’m a member of the human race.

[O]ur revolt was as much against the traditional black leadership structure as it was against segregation and discrimination.

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Our situation is intolerable, but what's worse is to sit here and do nothing.

Overlooked in this ominous depiction might be our country’s best- kept secret: in dealing with the most challenging issues of every gener- ation, resistance to duplicitous civil authority and its corporate enablers has defined our quintessential American story.

People believe what they want to believe. Even if it isn’t true.

People often call fighting discrimination being 'PC' because they don't want their own unearned privileges challenged.

Our system was not set up to for the government to be able to do with a man's kingdom what they want. It was set up to protect that man's kingdom, to allow him to feel that his borders, no matter how great or small, would always be secure and that he would always be allowed to defend them. The Supreme Court took that right away with their eminent domain ruling back in 2005. The governments have taken advantage of that eminent domain ruling, and you, the media, have failed at protecting citizens.

[People] are beginning to awaken to an idea we gave meaning to in the sixties: We are one people, one family, the human family, and what affects one of us affects us all.

People often call fighting racism being 'PC' when they don't want to confront their own prejudice

People wore different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn't hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore costumes to deny blame.

People with disabilities should not be considered as unadvataged because they can have high self esteem as others to fulfill their potential. People should be aware that a disability is something that some people can be born with and it is not a choice for them. Therefore, they should be treated with respect and should not be discriminated because this kind of behavior can socially isolate them from being part of the rest of their community.

Perhaps it was true a century ago—I deeply regret that it is no longer true—but the United States criminal justice system long ago lost any legitimate claim to the loyal cooperation of American citizens. You cannot write tens of thousands of criminal statutes, including many touching upon conduct that is neither immoral nor dangerous, write those laws as broadly as you can imagine, scatter them throughout the thousands of pages of the United States Code—and then expect decent law-abiding, unsuspecting citizens to cooperate with an investigation into whether they may have violated some law they have never even heard about. The next time some police officer or government agent asks you whether you would be willing to answer a few questions about where you have been and what you have been doing, you must respectfully but very firmly decline.

Perot's father did not know what civil rights were: this was how you treated other human beings.

Plus I have no doubt that their garden is also where my grandparents dreamed—for a better life of equality for their grandchildren and future generations. As people rooted in their faith, they probably did a lot of praying here as well, that God would deliver us all to prosperity and peace beyond this plot of land.

Prejudice plunges you into a world of fear and hate. That's no way to live.

Privilege doesn't just insulate people from the consequences of their prejudice, it cuts them off from their humanity.

Privilege is when you contribute to the oppression of others and then claim that you are the one being discriminated against.

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

Serve others: The heart of the leader is manifested through service to others.

Racism is dead only to those who've closed their eyes and ears to the whole world around them.

Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million people. I beg you to recognize human life draped in a form and guise alien to ours, but springing from a soil plowed and sown by our own hands. I ask you to recognize laws and processes flowing from such a condition, understand them, seek to change them. If we do none of these, then we should not pretend horror or surprise when thwarted life expresses itself in fear and hate and crime.

Righteous indignation calls sin what it is. Bigotry is sin. Racism is sin. Oppression is sin. Control by fear is sin. Violence is sin. The quicker we can all admit that, the quicker the healing will begin.

Self defense is the inherent right of an individual to repel any unwarranted attack. Governments are not individuals and should not have the power to restrict or invalidate a person's ability to defend him/herself.

Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.

Segregation in the American South was bankrolled by the wealthy eugenicist from the Northeast, Wickliffe Draper.

[T]he full and complete development of a country, the welfare of the world and the cause of peace require the maximum participation of women on equal terms with men in all fields." [Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979)]

Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.

The 20th Century proved that there is nothing more dangerous to the health of ethnic minority communities than big government.

The act of our creation is equal for all of us. The results are not. The goal of our Foundation is to treat everyone equally under the law.

The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.

The bed sheet brigade is bad enough, but the real threat to Americans and human rights today is the plain clothes Klux in the halls of government and certain black-robed Klux on court benches.

The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks's bus." "Who lost Rosa Parks's bus?" "White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That's what my sister says, anyway." "I don't know." Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. "What you mean, 'You don't know'? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That'd be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson's jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way.

The darkness of ignorance is allergic to the light of your truth. Speak your truth.

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.

Take a long, hard look down the road you will have to travel once you have made a commitment to work for change. Know that this transformation will not happen right away. Change often takes time. It rarely happens all at once. In the movement, we didn't know how history would play itself out. When we were getting arrested and waiting in jail or standing in unmovable lines on the courthouse steps, we didn’t know what would happen, but we knew it had to happen. Use the words of the movement to pace yourself. We used to say that ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part. And if we believe in the change we seek, then it is easy to commit to doing all we can, because the responsibility is ours alone to build a better society and a more peaceful world.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim - for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives - is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

The basic fact is that for the person without civil rights, death is always present in the background, forever dancing, each second of the day, before his eyes.

The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens – American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did – consume. Now they don’t use those words any more – it’s the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes.

The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble.

...the majority in a democracy has no more right to tyrannize over a minority than, under a different system, the latter would to oppress the former.

The price of conviction has never been cheap, but it will always be worth it.

The problem with today's culture is that we have too many rights and not enough wrongs.

The missing link between humans and apes? It's certainly those brutes who haven't yet learned to respect privacy.

There is no such thing as free speech for some. You either have free speech for everyone or you don't have free speech at all.

The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not.

There is more than one way to be Kluxed, and we need to think about ourselves and the kind of people we elect into public office.

There are all kinds of ways to be in the world. And no matter what has happened to us, or what we have been told, or what we have believed, we get to choose our way.

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