Quotes About Human rights

If torture is permitted, it's hard to imagine what isn't.

In its report issued that year, 1991, Amnesty International recorded protests against human rights abuses in over fifty countries, the protest to thirteen countries making specific reference to torture. These are the kinds of thing many of us have a vague background awareness of, without there being much publicity unless the perpetrators are some currently loathed regime, or unless some highly visible Westerner is among the victims.

Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights. But at the same time, it offers a valuable perspective from which we can understand and critique some of the ugly parts of secular societies.

There are indeed moral universals — the Hebrew Bible calls them 'the covenant with Noah' and they form the basis of modern codes of human rights. But they exist to create space for cultural and religious difference…

He is announcing to the most powerful ruler of the ancient world that these people may be your slaves but they are My children. The story of the exodus is as much political as theological. Theologically, the plagues showed that the Creator of nature is supreme over the forces of nature. Politically it declared that over every human power stands the sovereignty of God, defender and guarantor of the rights of humankind.

The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.

Nothing in all history," exulted William Lloyd Garrison, equaled "this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from … the auction-block to the ballot-box.

Who would have known that much of the wealth in their nation's booming economy was created on the other side of the world by the most brutal mistreatment of other human beings, many of them women and children?

He and his allies declared that every human being was equal in God's sight and made in the image of God, and must therefore be treated with equal dignity.

And workers who needed to go to the bathroom weren't allowed to take a break. They were forced to pee right on the slaughterhouse floor, near meat that people would soon be eating.

There are people who have been touched by, let's call it for the sake of argument, magic to the point where they're no longer entirely people even under human rights legislation. Nightingale calls them the fae but that's a catch-all term like the way the Greeks used the word "barbarian" or the Daily Mail uses "Europe.

It's because I'm a rat,' he said. 'Isn't it?' 'You're not really a rat,' I said. 'I'm a rat and this is a violation of the human rights act.' I really wish members of the public would bother to read that bloody act before quoting from it. 'No it isn't,' I said. 'Apart from anything else, if you really are a rat, then the Human Rights Act doesn't apply.

Labour accepts that the European Court of Human Rights needs reform.

America has an obligation to secure its borders, but it is wrong to pass laws that treat human beings as something less than human. If my father were alive, he would be in the forefront of the struggle for a fair and humane reform of our immigration laws.

It has never been illegal to be a refugee.

I didn't plan that there'd be this awful situation in which our European governments, just to start the story off, breaking the Geneva conventions on the protection on the human rights of refugees.

I got a job as a human rights and refugees officer, working on youth-based projects. But I realized all the kids I was working with were far more into 'The Daily Show' than the policy briefings.

Sending genuine refugees to face persecution in order to dissuade others from seeking to come here is plainly illegal.

The 20th century was a century in which human rights were infringed upon in numerous parts of the world, and Japan also bears responsibility in that regard. I believe that we have to look at our own history with humility and think about our responsibility.

Hillary Clinton has a strong and powerful voice regarding ending violence against women and girls.

In Uzbekistan, hundreds of protesters were recently killed under the corrupt regime of President Karimov in what human rights groups are calling a massacre.

It's one thing to say you're feminist, but then what does that mean? Not selling arms to a regime that is the most repressive and probably one of the worst human rights violators, particularly towards women, like Saudi Arabia?

In both Burma and Laos, we have engaged countries that were once adversaries, and will continue to do so in ways that promote good relations, development, and human rights.