Quotes About Advocacy

In this life and death case, I felt Mrs. Schiavo should receive the fullest due process from our legal system.

The lack of health care coverage has remained very important to me during my time in Congress and as a member of the House Subcommittee on Health, I am working hard with my colleagues to correct these inequalities.

Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote.

Philosophers and poets may be truth seekers. Lawyers only want to win.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke." —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

When the law doesn't work, you gotta work the law.

If we do not step forward, then we will step back. If we do not protect a right, then we deny it.

Maybe it's wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people. [as quoted in "Brain Gain" by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 4/27/09 issue]

I'm a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.

Our work is deeply rooted in respect for the patient. Most of us want to help people who often have been left behind and forgotten by society.

As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen, I will always speak for peace, and no one can silence me in this.

The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic, but to end the injustice.

This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America

A few days after Paul was banned from Madison Square Garden, over six thousand people showed up at a Harlem rally for him. And though the leadership of the black establishment either failed to support Paul or joined in the attacks against him, a significant portion of black public opinion became even more sympathetic.

Politics is not about power.

If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.

Amnesty International should list all daughters as prisoners of war.

In not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each case, I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating vindicated. And what I very often say is that I've lived to see my lost causes found.

When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

The educator has the duty of not being neutral.

To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.