Quotes About Human rights

As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release.

South Africa has not turned its back on human rights at all.

I don't think the current regime of South Korea will deal actively with the issue of North Korean defectors.

Palestinian children deserve the same right to be free in their own land as Israeli children in their land. A two-state solution will finally bring Israelis the security and normalcy to which they are entitled, and Palestinians the sovereignty and dignity they deserve.

It cannot be right in a world of increasing human progress - whether in medicine, space exploration or renewable energy - that so many people are denied the most basic human rights.

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.

I was brought up in a family of journalists, and a mother who was deeply committed to human rights, so I think that the mix of those two huge influences have been very, very important to me.

It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi," the NAACP declared in a 1947 petition to the United Nations. The petition, which decried "the denial of human rights to minorities in the case of citizens of Negro descent in the United States," created an "international sensation

But his main character flaw was that of so many French revolutionaries: a zeal for human rights so self-righteous that it translated into intolerance for the actual human beings around him. Brissot

I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed.

wrong is because it is the taking of a life. When you take someone's life, you also take away their right to liberty and their pursuit of happiness. If you take someone's life, you also take their dream, their future, their family, their career, and their children away from them. All other rights are lost when you take away the right to life.

If a government has no motivation to guarantee human rights within its borders, those rights can disappear. If those whose rights are violated cannot find protection, they are unlikely to accuse and fight those with guns and power.

Slavery is theft -- theft of a life, theft of work, theft of any property or produce, theft even of the children a slave might have borne.

Slavery is about money. People are enslaved to make a profit. Most slaveholders have little interest in hurting anyone, in being cruel or torturing someone; it is simply part of the job.

History has taught us that no society built upon the exploitation of any of its individuals can long endure

However, America also began to see its many Cold War allies in a new light, questioning their usefulness and seeing their flaws in sharper relief. Since it would have been seen as unethical (not to mention ungrateful) to use and then abandon allies, America needed an ethical justification. Under Jimmy Carter in the 1980s, America started bringing human rights into foreign policy conversations. By the 1990s, human rights were used as a tool to create distance from inconvenient or former allies.

The hangman is a disgrace to any civilized country.

The child is not a citizen of the future; he (sic) is a citizen from the very first moment of life and also the most important citizen because he represents and brings the 'possible'...a bearer, here and now of rights, of values, of culture...It is our hiostorical responsibility not only to affirm this but the create cultural, social, political and educational contexts which are able to receive children and dialogue with their potential for constructing human rights.

The Second Amendment is so inherently, structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans.

Yet as myopic and convoluted as the rulings have been, there is a clear human rights pathway on this: The court simply has to acknowledge how profoundly embedded racism is in the criminal justice system—from racial profiling to police stops, to access to competent counsel, to jury selection, to the impact of the victim's race on the trial, to sentencing—and declare the death penalty unconstitutional.

Once torture is justified in rare cases, it is easier to justify it in others: Let's torture not only this bastard we are sure knows where the bomb is, but this other bastard who might know where the bomb is, and also this bastard who might have some general information that could be useful in five years, and also this other guy who might be a bastard only we aren't sure.

Was sind das für Konstellationen in der Gegenwart, in denen zufällige oder angeborene Unterschiede ausgesucht werden, um daran soziale Anerkennung oder gar Menschen- und Bürgerrechte zu koppeln?

Others' freedom is not an internal affair. It is an eternal affair.

The security of our world is found in the advancing rights of mankind.