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Civil Rights Quotes

Browse 1527 quotes about Civil Rights.

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Civil Rights Quotes

“Let's look at two things real quickly: the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the Sixties and the Arab Spring starting in Tunisia and Cairo. What they had in common was people who were told, and who believed inside themselves, that they were a certain way, and the society at large believed it.”

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Author:Bill Ayers
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“In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.”

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Author:Bill Ayers
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“Every person with a pulse has a responsibility to stand in solidarity with the Muslim community that is on the front lines fighting against groups like ISIS, both militarily and ideologically, every day, and now on the front line of standing up for civil liberties and civil rights to make America great. [They] are the best insurance for the safety of all Americans.”

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Author:Van Jones
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“I go back to the parallels with 1963, 1964 when white America really became aware of the brutality of segregation, the cruelty of the apartheid system which existed in the south. Then white people began to get on the freedom buses and travel to the south and be part of the voter registration drives and they... some of them were beaten and some of them were murdered but they stood with the African-American community and the civil rights movement. It's time for straight people to do that today and it is time for gay people to insist that they do that today.”

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Author:Cleve Jones
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“We're in Trump times - we're in the time this misogynist hate clown is the leader of the free world, and when Putin has made abusing your wife legal, and transgender bathrooms have just been disallowed in school. There are all these political setbacks. And there's no question that those setbacks are very real and need to be treated as civil-rights issues.”

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Author:Stephen Marche
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“What is the appeal of Trump, really? It's nostalgic: "Make America great again." Like European nationalists, he has a vision of a "real" America, one which predates globalization, immigration, feminism, the civil rights movement and technological change, an imaginary 1950s to which we can now return. That is actually not very different from the kind of language that Marine Le Pen uses, or parts of the Brexit movement.”

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Author:Anne Applebaum
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“There used to be a joke that women need a reason to have sex, while men only need a place. Does policy reflect that juvenile mindset? Such a requirement baffles some women in the real world: a female member of the US Commission on Civil Rights told me, 'I am still trying to wrap my mind around the idea of any two intimates in the world agreeing as to "why.'”

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Author:Rush Limbaugh
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“Eventually [black men] are arrested, whether they've committed any serious crime or not, and branded criminals or felons for life. Upon release, they're ushered into a parallel social universe in which the civil and human rights supposedly won during the Civil Rights Movement no longer apply to them.”

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Author:Michelle Alexander
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“I think this mythology - that we're all beyond race, of course our police officers aren't racist, of course our politicians don't mean any harm to people of color - this idea that we're beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what's going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest.”

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Author:Michelle Alexander
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“I was raised a right-wing Republican and was about eighteen when I had to admit to myself that in regards to the great domestic crucible of the day, civil rights and racial justice, conservatives were on the wrong side historically and morally, and that it took too much intellectual and psychological jujitsu to pretend otherwise. I didn't want to pretend anymore; I wanted to be on the right side.”

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Author:Steve Erickson
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“If you look at the history of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller, in Latin America, in Indonesia, where almost a million people, mainly Communists, were killed by General Suharto, who was backed by the CIA, in South Africa, in the US Civil Rights Movement - or even now, it's very disturbing. They have always worked closely with the US State Department.”

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Author:Arundhati Roy
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“When people denounced [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for rejecting and criminalizing homosexuality, it should be remembered that was true of the United States until very recently. Women's rights were unheard of. Civil rights proponents were horribly treated, not just in the South. It was awful there, but pretty bad here. Environmental issues did not exist. Opposition to aggression was virtually zero. In fact, so little, that to this day, even scholarship mentions the Vietnam War as beginning in 1965.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“This generation is different. They are not as interested in chasing money or material possessions. I believe that this generation is more interested in seeking social change and a more just society than any generation since those that brought about the civil rights movement and the struggles for human dignity of the 1960s.”

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Author:Andrew Aydin
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“I think it is a must for young people and generations yet to come, to understand, to feel, to touch, to almost smell the drama of what happened a few short years ago [the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s]. So maybe, just maybe, we will never ever repeat this unbelievable time in our history. We have to tell it all, and make it plain, and make it clear, so people will never ever forget the distance we have come, and the progress we have yet to make.”

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Author:John Lewis
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“There has to be spiritual transformation among the masses, who have to be willing to recognize that their oppression is not a law of nature. That's what Latin American bishops were doing when they formed base communities. They were trying to get peasants to recognize that you can take your fate into your own hands. That's what the civil-rights movement did here. That's what the women's movement did.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“We have to help decision makers realize that women's reproductive health rights are civil rights and that women need to be free to make the same decisions that men are free to make with regard to health care and whether and when to have a family. It's going to be increasingly important for women to speak up not only about being able to make our own decisions, but also about the importance of being trusted to make our own decisions.”

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Author:Maggie Hassan
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“The gay rights movement of recent years has been an inspiring victory for humanity and it is in the tradition of the civil rights movement when I was a young boy in the South, the women's suffrage movement when my mother was a young woman in Tennessee, the abolition movement much farther back, and the anti-apartheid movement when I was in the House of Representatives. All of these movements have one thing in common: the opposition to progress was rooted in an outdated understanding of morality.”

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Author:Al Gore
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“O.J. Simpson was primarily interested in O.J. His rise to fame in the late '60s coincided with the period where black athletes were more outspoken and political than in any era. You're talking about the generation of black athletes that came about after Jackie Robinson. Athletes after that were just happy to find a place in sports. But when you got to the mid-'60s, you had athletes like Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali, who were very outspoken on the issues of race and civil rights.”

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Author:Ezra Edelman
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“Okay, so here's my question: When did civility become incompatible with protest? Why do some people consider civility an antonym - anathema, even - to political action and dissent? Because, and I'm raising my voice, it's not. Have we forgotten how Mahatma Gandhi used nonviolent civil disobedience to free India from British rule and inspire civil rights movements worldwide?”

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Author:Steven Petrow
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“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

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Book:A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings
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“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.”

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Book:The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr
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“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

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Book:The Measure of a Man
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“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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