Human Rights Movement Quotes

Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union. A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would now be certainly necessary. The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation.

You have to join every other movement for the freedom of people. Therefore join the movement as individuals against anti-Semitism, join the movements for the rights of Hispanics, the rights of women, the rights of gays. In other words, I think that each movement has to stand on its own feet because it has a particular agenda, but it can ask other people.

The civil rights movement didn't begin in Montgomery and it didn't end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.

We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets.

My links with [Mahatma] Gandhi now are very political links because I do not believe there is any other politics available to us in the late twentieth century, a period of a totalitarianism linked with the market. There is really no other way you can do politics and create freedom for people without the kinds of instruments he revived. Civil disobedience is a way to create permanent democracy, perennial democracy, a direct democracy.

Young people, throughout history, have always been the lifeblood of every movement for civil and human rights.

If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable.

If Martin [Luther King, Jr.]'s philosophy had been embraced and lived out in Iraq and other places, we wouldn't have bin Ladens.

For many years as a foreign correspondent, I not only worked alongside human rights advocates, but considered myself one of them. To defend the rights of those who have none was the reason I became a journalist in the first place. Now, I see the human rights movement as opposing human rights.

To me and to a number of other activists from the U.S., we believe that the human rights movement has to evolve and understand the global implications of structural racism. This means engaging the United Nations and a variety of other human rights bodies.

I think of myself as a human-rights advocate and as a mother.

The same thing will happen in China that happened in Chile. Political freedom will ultimately break out of its shackles. Tiananmen Square was only the first episode. It is headed for a series of Tiananmen Squares. It cannot continue to develop privately and at the same time maintain its authoritarian character politically. It is headed for a clash. Sooner or later, one or the other will give.

Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the struggle for equal rights.

It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights.

There is a broad movement that has been holding companies accountable on human rights for a long time.

We need to fight for a new human rights movement that recognizes and values black life.

The logic of the human rights movement is imperialist. I don't think it was necessarily intended this way. But once you talk about categories like international justice, or you talk about bringing people to justice, or an end to impunity -- I'm just using the standard slogans of the human rights movement -- if you're really serious about that, the only way to do it is by at least the possible use of force. The human rights movement, whether wittingly or unwittingly, has increasingly become a force for a recolonization of the world, in the name of rights…. the human rights movement, if it had its way, would plunge us into epics of war.

The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship's pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.