Best 453 quotes in «human rights quotes» category

The best way to be more free is to grant more freedom to others.

The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights. Human rights is the fruit of various civilizations. I know of no civilization that tolerates or justifies violence, terrorism, or injustice. There is no civilization that justifies the killing of innocent people. Those who are invoking cultural relativism are really using that as an excuse for violating human rights and to put a cultural mask on the face of what they're doing.

The death penalty experiment has failed.

The first thing to say is that the ordinary criminal law in this country, the Human Rights Act, the Children's Act, all of the laws of the country take precedence, but what I'm also saying is that within the context of a secular country, which Britain now kind of is, or at least a country which purports to be relatively equal between religions, there should be some scope for allowing faith communities to govern themselves - subject to it being consensual and subject to everyone's human rights being observed.

The Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, if you look at its website, it basically deals with commercial disputes, it's not allowed to deal with matters involving children, it's not allowed to deal with criminal matters, it's subject to judicial review, it's subject to the Human Rights Act, it's subject to the Children's Act, and it's completely proper and right that it should be subject to all those things.

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

The reason why the war ended in Bosnia was not because of amnesty but because a combined Croat-Bosnian offensive defeated the Serbs on the battlefield. Sometimes naïveté belongs not to the human rights activists but to the politicians.

There is no humiliation more abusive than hunger.

There's a feminist critique of Muslim Arbitration Tribunals, which I'm certainly not unsympathetic to, because as I keep saying, I come from a human rights context. But there's a feminist critique of Muslim Arbitration Tribunals specifically, which says women are going to have their rights eroded by virtue of the fact of these courts are going to negotiate settlements and negotiate the dropping of criminal charges against men. There's not been any evidence of that taking place.

Unfortunately the situation of human rights in Iran isn't improving. Some of the newspapers were shut down and the government didn't try to reopen the newspapers that were shut down before. And the laws are as bad as before.

Tolerance and human rights require each other.

US law and international human rights law have radically diverged in the past years in terms of the recognition of indigenous people's rights. International human rights law now looks at not whether or not the tribes have formal ownership or legal title in a Western legal conception might have it, but rather they look at the tribe's historical connection to that land.

We have less civil liberties than we had on 9/ 1 1 in some significant ways. But we are also, I believe, less safe as a result in many instances of the sacrifice in human rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law that (the Bush) administration has adopted.

We will not keep silent, even if the Formula One is taking place. We will protest for human rights and freedom.

We've seen in Europe after the recent terrorist attacks a certain retrogression in human rights. It depends on how threatened the Turks feel. For example, Turkey became much more tolerant towards Kurdish nationalists when the killing of Turkish soldiers stopped in southeastern Turkey and body bags stopped arriving. Now, since June there's been a revival of Kurdish attacks on Turkish troops - something like 150 people have been killed by terrorists supplied from and operating out of bases in northern Iraq. So Turks are feeling much less tolerant of Kurdish nationalism.

Adoptee rights are everyone's rights, and they deserve to be protected.

Without peace, there is little hope for human rights

You can't have occupation and human rights.

When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.

Accepting experiences is through the understanding that everybody was born equal, no labels, no social status, no preconceptions just born a little person preparing to grow-up on what ever path is grown from development, environment and/or otherwise everybody has the right to have a roof over their head, three meals a day, a wage/payment which can support themselves and their families, a benefit system that cares for the disabled and people with mental illnesses, a government that looks out for all it's people, wars quenched not and man made barriers be fallen so every person knows the commonality of being human is that everybody is all different and let people be novices to other peoples experiences so another person gains anew. People all deserve the right to be equal.

Ah, my dear friend Hassim, seems our paths cross once again, how fortunate for this humble Sheik.” As Abdullah spoke in his usual self deprecating manner I realized that a favor was on the tip of his tongue and that I was about to be offered a quid-pro-quo. We were sitting crossed legged on large fat pillows with gold fringe. The tent was large with partitions dividing living, sleeping and cooking space. It was made from heavy cotton canvas erected on thick poles in the center giving the structure a peaked circus tent appearance. The women serving us were young, wearing harem pants low on their hips with cropped gauze tops made from sheer silk. Their exposed midriffs were flat and toned, their belly buttons were decorated in precious stones that glittered in the torch light as they moved. They were bare footed with stacks of gold ankle bracelets making the only sound we heard as they kept our glasses filled with fresh sweet tea and our communal serving trays piled high with dates and sugar incrusted sweets of undetermined origin. Abdullah took no notice of these women, his nonchalance intrigued me as I was obviously having trouble keeping my mind focused on the discussion at hand, this was all part of the Arab way, when it came to negotiation they had no peers. “So my dear friend, tell me, the region is on fire is there a solution?” I spoke in a deliberate and flat tone, little emotion just concern, one friend to another. “We were shocked by the American response in Egypt and Libya, never had we seen them move so fast with such efficiency. The fall of Gadaffi was unexpected and Mubarak’s fate stunned us; he had been a staunch supporter of the US in this region we fully expected the Obama administration to prop him up one more time, as they had done so many times in the past.” I looked carefully at Abdullah,

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollection of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

All of society’s problems which could be solved by money, were caused by money.

All humans are images of your own self - their pain is your pain - their misery is your misery - their sorrows are your sorrows - so rise and be the hope, help and joy in their lives!

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.

A melhor forma de determinar se uma pessoa foi expulsa do âmbito da lei é perguntar se, para ela, seria melhor cometer um crime. Se um pequeno furto pode melhorar a sua posição legal, pelo menos temporariamente, podemos estar certos de que foi destituída dos direitos humanos. Pois o crime passa a ser, então, a melhor forma de recuperação de certa igualdade humana, mesmo que ela seja reconhecida como exceção à norma.

A man is only noble when he has pity on all living creatures.” -Shenita Etwaroo

Americans care more about the rights of animals than about what happens to us!

An advanced human rights friendly Constitution is fine and well - but what good is it if it is not put into practice? The government says it cherishes the principles in the SA Constitution, and yet acts in a manner which cannot be reconciled with that very Constitution.

Animal and human rights are not ‘on the fence’ issues. You’re either on the right side or the wrong side of the fence.” -Shenita Etwaroo

Anarchism is the purity of rebellion. A pig who struggles wildly and rends the air with his cries while he is held to be slaughtered, and a baby who kicks and screams when, wanting warmth and his mother's breast, he is made to wait in the cold—these are two samples of natural rebellion. Natural rebellion always inspires either deep sympathy and identification with the rebelling creature, or a stiffening of the heart and an activation of aggressive-defensive mechanisms to silence an accusing truth. This truth is that each living being is an end in itself; that nothing gives a being the right to make another a mere instrument of his purposes.

And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.

Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can't life and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.

Animal testing, including vivisection, only tests the ability of the human being to be inhuman.” -Shenita Etwaroo

Animal rights come before human rights.

An obedient to unjust law it's an act of promoting injustice.

Any political party that fails to fire or to get rid of its corrupt members. It is highly that those members were not acting on their own capacity or interest, but they were following orders from the party committee or execs.

Any silly ism or stupid book that considers men above women, must be shunned like a lowlife demon. For, all's one, barring none.

As a human rights activist it is concerning to me that those committing atrocities against vulnerable people view these atrocities as 'progress', and assert with pride and conviction that they are 'Christians' and that they are doing 'God's will'.

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

As a bird has the right to sing, so shall every human being have the right to think and express thoughts.

As a human being you have the right to express yourself. You have the right to journey wherever your mind wanders and to express the thoughts you come up with along the way. You have the right to believe, and to atone, the same way you have the right to love and to hate.

As long as humans feel they are forced to defend their own rights and worth by placing someone beneath them, oppression will not end.

As he defended the book one evening in the early 1980s at the Carnegie Endowment in New York, I knew that some of what he said was true enough, just as some of it was arguably less so. (Edward incautiously dismissed 'speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings or sabotage commercial airliners' as the feverish product of 'highly exaggerated stereotypes.') Covering Islam took as its point of departure the Iranian revolution, which by then had been fully counter-revolutionized by the forces of the Ayatollah. Yes, it was true that the Western press—which was one half of the pun about 'covering'—had been naïve if not worse about the Pahlavi regime. Yes, it was true that few Middle East 'analysts' had had any concept of the latent power of Shi'ism to create mass mobilization. Yes, it was true that almost every stage of the Iranian drama had come as a complete surprise to the media. But wasn't it also the case that Iranian society was now disappearing into a void of retrogressive piety that had levied war against Iranian Kurdistan and used medieval weaponry such as stoning and amputation against its internal critics, or even against those like unveiled women whose very existence constituted an offense?

As I stood in line at the drug store one day, I heard a man yelling for someone to come to him, he even whistled. I expected a child (although that would have been unacceptable in its own right), but what I saw was a grown woman, ashamed, frightened. I haven’t been able to get the look in her eyes out of my mind. Shenita Etwaroo

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 Argentina.' In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.

At the heart of the struggle of women, people of color, the disabled, the poor, organized workers, immigrants, religious minorities, atheists,and sexual minorities is the radical belief that we are all created equal and deserve the right to life, liberty and pursuits of happiness.

Believers in liberal freedom should worry not whether their regime can prevail in competition with authoritarian ones, but whether they can prevail against their own forms of institutional entropy: elite capture, corruption, and inequality.

A human being can only take so much when their basic rights as a citizen of the earth are being denied to them – or sold at a high cost.