Quotes About Civil rights

Civil rights icons, famous journalists, big-time movie producers may all have credits to their name that we can recognize and be grateful for, but their record of good works cannot excuse their harassment of women.

I am not a civil rights leader, and I don't profess to be one.

I do not want to deny anyone their livelihood or civil rights. Who wants to discriminate against anybody... But when it comes to homosexuality, I believe the laws of our land should be in line with God's laws.

No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never wavered in my support for civil rights or the civil rights act.

We have a fabulous civil rights history here in Birmingham.

I just couldn't believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest. I was running around, face burning, and nothing I saw looked like America to me.

Let us not return to the old battlefield where so many shed blood and tears for the right to vote. Instead let us move forward to an era where all eligible Americans have equal access to the ballot box and have the freedom to vote for the candidate of their choosing.

I came at age in the '60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.

The Greens have every right to run, that's what democracy is, and they should argue their point by saying how they think people should vote, not by telling us to be silent.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

These are the tranquillized Fifties,and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,and made my manic statement,telling off the state and president, and thensat waiting sentence in the bull penbeside a Negro boy with curlicuesof marijuana in his hair.

La gente siempre dice que no cedí mi asiento porque estaba cansada, pero eso no es cierto. No estaba cansada físicamente. No, estaba cansada de sacrificarme. ROSA PARKS

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if "having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder's shotgun?

In 1870 he oversaw creation of the Justice Department, its first duty to bring thousands of anti-Klan indictments. By 1872 the monster had been slain, although its spirit resurfaced as the nation retreated from Reconstruction's lofty aims. Grant presided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote, and landmark civil rights legislation, including the 1875 act outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations.

Rosa Parks will be remembered for her lasting contributions to society. Her legacy lives on in the continued struggle for civil rights around the world. She will be missed.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established.

You cannot understand the politics of today without understanding the Civil Rights Movement and the role it played in our society.

We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as free humans in this society.

When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom.

The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.

I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Negro for his freedom.

We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes. ... The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

Jim Crow was king... and I heard a game in which Jackie Robinson was playing, and I felt pride in being alive