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Human Rights Quotes

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Human Rights Quotes

“There are three kinds of people in the world - Those who make the world, those who mock the makers, and those who sleep through all the making and mocking. Or better yet, there are humans then there are animals - Humans who make the world, humans who help the makers, and animals are those who keep mocking and sleeping.”

Social JusticeHuman RightsHumanitarianIndifferenceService Of HumanitySociologySocial WorkPolitical ScienceCivic DutyWorld Building
Book:Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo
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“Synthetic Civilization (The Sonnet) The watchwords of civilization, Are reason and inclusion. Yet we live by the golden rules, Of rigidity and exclusion. We dress up in fancy clothes, To feel powerful and important. Beneath the lies of civilization, Beats a heart most impotent. We boast proudly about equality, Unaware of our biases most inane. We admire the rights of our own, Rights of others are business of the UN. Enough of this make belief ascension. It’s time to humanize our synthetic civilization.”

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Book:Neden Türk: The Gospel of Secularism
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“People are suffering, what's that to us! Nation is suffering, what's that to us! Society is suffering, what’s that to us! The world is suffering, what's that to us! Such mentality has shoved our entire human civilization into the abyss of misery.”

SufferingProgressCivilizationHuman RightsHumanitarianIndifferenceSocial IssuesPrejudicesSuffering Of Humanity
Book:When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders
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“In school, there is always a bully that gained the class's attention by using fear and abuse. At the time, his tactics won by getting the class's attention - and those who followed him either saw his way was working or were fearful of his retaliation, so went along with it. Eventually, his way faded because as his peers grew up, they found fear was only a state of mind that could be replaced by something more constructive, that the system would punish his behavior, or that others did not like his way and together as a group banded together to not be bothered. It is the short road of the bully that never wins in the end. For many, what we learn in school continues on into adulthood. The bully may still haunt us from time to time when we feel vulnerable, but the long road remembers the system is our collective rights, the banding together are our individual communities, and replacing fear with constructive thought is maturity.”

FearCommunityMindfulnessEmpowermentHuman RightsIndividualityPositivityBullyingTruth Of LifeTrust Yourself
Author:Lorin Morgan-Richards
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“It seems to me that the greatest triumph of any human rights movement, be it fighting for racial, religious, sexual or gender equality – is to achieve that moment where eyes are opened so wide that a sort of blindness sets in. I don’t care if someone is black, white, gay or straight. I don’t care if a woman has children or no – I just want to know who they are. [...] At the end of the day, gender differences seem to me to be just a tiny, tiny drop in the great expanse of things that make people unique. Unique, not ‘different’, not ‘other’ merely another piece of that great teaming mass that makes up the wonderfully rich, thrillingly varied definition of ‘humanity’." [Playing Butch: Blog entry, February 24, 2014]”

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Author:Kate Griffin
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“Peace and gladness in every home is a peace for the society, nation and the world.”

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Book:Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
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“We are still relatively free in our purchasing decisions. However, the biggest infringement is caused by our monetary system and the taxes and other charges being forced upon us. Taking our money away via taxes, other charges and inflation highly limits our freedom because we are no longer able to enjoy the fruits of our labor. The stronger members of society, ¨the rich¨, have their ways of getting around the compulsory purchase of taxes. Inflation is even beneficial to them because they can use the non-backed currency to buy real assets which will make them even richer.”

PovertyCapitalismHuman RightsSocial Injustice
Book:New World Order Exposed: Strategy, tactics and methods of the power elite
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“If we still had gold as our currency, we would now all be filthy rich. Instead, we only have a few really rich people, It is no coincidence that this small group consists of the same families behind the American central banking system. The truth is that the founding of the American Federal Reserve Bank is the greatest systematic looting of wealth the world has ever seen. (...) The likelihood that this crime against humanity happened by chance is close to zero.”

PovertyCapitalismHuman RightsSocial Injustice
Book:New World Order Exposed: Strategy, tactics and methods of the power elite
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“...government needs to destroy our self-confidence and stop us from thinking logically. They can only do this by redefining words or creating new ones. Before government can reign over our bodies, it must rule over our minds. This explains the real reason for mandatory public education. (...) The earlier government education begins, the better it is for the slaveholders because it's easiest to influence children. The belief that government is there to take care of us is at the beginning of all brainwashing.”

PovertyCapitalismHuman RightsSocial Injustice
Book:New World Order Exposed: Strategy, tactics and methods of the power elite
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“Clinton had a universe of faults but under her administration we likely wouldn't have seen married people being picked up and separated by border patrol. Health care, including Planned Parenthood, which is the only access to prenatal and gynecological health care many poor women have at all, wouldn't be at risk. The Paris Climate Accord wouldn't have been tossed out. We wouldn't be going the other way on mass incarceration, prison privatization and the drug war. We wouldn't be facing the rebirth of the old Jim Crow. Which is not to say that a Clinton presidency would have meant peace and justice for all. It wouldn't have. She would have pushed an agenda that elevated the American Empire in terrible ways. But the loss of even the most compromising of agreements, accords and legislation means that we are starting from negative numbers. It means that we can't focus on pushing for something far better than the ACA -- like single-payer health care -- but that we have to fight for even the most basic of rights.”

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Book:When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
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“May we always be burdened with thinking of the suffering of others, for that is what it means to be human.”

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Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“Fear is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited. There is nothing new or recent about fear—it is doubtless as old as the life of man on the planet. Fears are of many kinds—fear of objects, fear of people, fear of the future, fear of nature, fear of the unknown, fear of old age, fear of disease, and fear of life itself. Then there is fear which has to do with aspects of experience and detailed states of mind. Our homes, institutions, prisons, churches, are crowded with people who are hounded by day and harrowed by night because of some fear that lurks ready to spring into action as soon as one is alone, or as soon as the lights go out, or as soon as one’s social defenses are temporarily removed. The ever-present fear that besets the vast poor, the economically and socially insecure, is a fear of still a different breed. It is a climate closing in; it is like the fog in San Francisco or in London. It is nowhere in particular yet everywhere. It is a mood which one carries around with himself, distilled from the acrid conflict with which his days are surrounded. It has its roots deep in the heart of the relations between the weak and the strong, between the controllers of environment and those who are controlled by it. When the basis of such fear is analyzed, it is clear that it arises out of the sense of isolation and helplessness in the face of the varied dimensions of violence to which the underprivileged are exposed. Violence, precipitate and stark, is the sire of the fear of such people. It is spawned by the perpetual threat of violence everywhere. Of course, physical violence is the most obvious cause. But here, it is important to point out, a particular kind of physical violence or its counterpart is evidenced; it is violence that is devoid of the element of contest. It is what is feared by the rabbit that cannot ultimately escape the hounds.”

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Author:Howard Thurman
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“With deregulation, privatisation, free trade, what we're seeing is yet another enclosure and, if you like, private taking of the commons. One of the things I find very interesting in our current debates is this concept of who creates wealth. That wealth is only created when it's owned privately. What would you call clean water, fresh air, a safe environment? Are they not a form of wealth? And why does it only become wealth when some entity puts a fence around it and declares it private property? Well, you know, that's not wealth creation. That's wealth usurpation.”

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Author:Elaine Bernard
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“Power is given only to those you allow to have power over you. No man was born with a master. The only master of all is the Creator, and he created all men to be free. Freedom is a God-given right, not a human-granted gift. No man should have to fight to breathe in good health and peace.”

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Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“As he defended the book one evening in the early 1980s at the Carnegie Endowment in New York, I knew that some of what he said was true enough, just as some of it was arguably less so. (Edward incautiously dismissed 'speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings or sabotage commercial airliners' as the feverish product of 'highly exaggerated stereotypes.') Covering Islam took as its point of departure the Iranian revolution, which by then had been fully counter-revolutionized by the forces of the Ayatollah. Yes, it was true that the Western press—which was one half of the pun about 'covering'—had been naïve if not worse about the Pahlavi regime. Yes, it was true that few Middle East 'analysts' had had any concept of the latent power of Shi'ism to create mass mobilization. Yes, it was true that almost every stage of the Iranian drama had come as a complete surprise to the media. But wasn't it also the case that Iranian society was now disappearing into a void of retrogressive piety that had levied war against Iranian Kurdistan and used medieval weaponry such as stoning and amputation against its internal critics, or even against those like unveiled women whose very existence constituted an offense?”

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Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“… many elements in these [traditional Islamic] laws are neither defensible on Islamic grounds nor tenable under contemporary conditions; not only are they contrary to the egalitarian spirit of Islam, they are invoked to deny Muslim women justice and dignified choices in life. … the provisions of the CEDAW [Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women] are more in line with the Shari’ah than are the provisions of family laws in many contemporary Muslim countries. -- Ziba Mir-Hosseini”

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Book:Mother Persia: Women in Iran's History
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“As a male taxi driver in Tehran complained, “Women no longer know their place, and they have disoriented us men too. They are taking our place everywhere: in the universities, the ministries, on the streets. Wherever you turn, there are aggressive women ready to push you aside. You are lucky if they don’t trample you under their feet.”

WomenHuman RightsIranSocial Change
Book:Mother Persia: Women in Iran's History
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“I didn't intentionally gravitate towards stories of women. I was interested in human rights, which often boiled down to this question: who was winning and who was losing? And over and over again, country after country, story after story, it was the men who were winning and the women who were losing. Not always, not everywhere, but most often, and by a wide, wide margin.”

MenWomenHuman RightsMemoir
Book:Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir
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“The Dark Cloud Is the sadness and anger that you experience sometimes Is the number of friends you lost because of rape crimes Is the mood of women in Juarez, Mexico that are scared of walking down the street because they see the rapists around the corner Is the disrespect that you endured because you were a “foreigner”

WomenCrimeHuman RightsImmigrantsWomen S RightsRapeWomen S EmpowermentFemicideJuarezMexico Rape
Book:The Dark Cloud
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“The Dark Cloud Is the decision I could have made to go into a homicidal rage when my bullies laughed at my father’s leg because he was shot in his ankle during the Bosnian War Is the rage I felt when 4 of my friends were raped in college because rapists like to roar Is the fierce determination I have to make sure that no woman ever gets raped Is the tragic end of girls and babies who were slaughtered while their rapists escaped”

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Book:The Dark Cloud
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“I am here to build an army of self-sacrificing humanitarians across space and time, to march unafraid in the course of equality, inclusion and ascension, fortified with accountability, reason and acceptance. So my question to you is - are you that army? If you are, then chisel this in your brain with the indelible ink of determination - your gospel is goodness, your religion is service, your church is society.”

SacrificeAcceptanceGoodnessHuman RightsHumanitarianService Of HumanityAccountabilityInclusionSelflessHumanitarianism
Book:When Veins Ignite: Either Integration or Degradation
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