Quotessence
Home / Topics / Human Rights Quotes

Human Rights Quotes

Browse 2102 quotes about Human Rights.

Related topics

PeopleWorldDemocracyIfsCountryJusticeLawMenPoliticalShouldThinkingGovernmentStatesLibertyMeanNationsBelieveDignityViolationIssuesValuesFreedomWantWarNeedsFightingHuman BeingsInternationalKnowsSecurityUniversalWayAbuseAmericaIndividualHuman Rights DayImportantCivil RightsDevelopmentDoeGivingHas BeensViolenceBasic Human RightsCommunityDemocraticEconomicStruggleSupportWomens RightsPolicyRights And FreedomsTodayUnitedFundamentalsInspirationalSocialDemocracy And Human RightsEqualYearsHumanityMotivationalRule Of LawTerrorismActivistCareChildrenGroupsInterestProtectStandardsInjusticeMoralOrderPersonsPovertyPrinciplesRecordsStillsDeclarationFirstsHelpingHuman DignityI BelieveIdeasLongProblemRealRealityTwoUseWellsChinaCultureLooksMadeMatterPeacePresidentSpeakmore

Human Rights Quotes

“What same-sex marriage, women's franchise and the end of segregation all have in common is that they extend the rights of a privileged group to everyone. And when people hear the phrase 'trans rights', they assume something similar is being demanded - that trans people be enabled to live without discrimination, harassment and violence, and to express themselves as they wish. Such goals are worthy ones, but they are not what mainstream transactivism is about. What campaigners mean by 'trans rights' is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are. This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans peoples' subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws. All this explains the speed. When you want new laws, you can focus on lobbying, rather than the painstaking business of building broad-based coalitions. And when those laws will take away other people's rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness - it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.”

Human RightsWomens RightsTransgenderTransGender IdentityTransexual
Book:Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
Create image

“I believe in the song of the white dove. On the threshold of the new technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nuclear warfare, human species are in new danger. There is an urgent need for superhuman compassion in machine.”

PeaceHuman RightsArtificial IntelligenceUnited NationsCompassionate AiNobel Peace PrizeQuantum ComputingNuclear WarfareWhite Dove
Book:Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence AI 5.0
Create image

“In the course of human events, if ever, injustice grabs hold of the landscape that we the people step foot on, it will be our organically divine right to abolish such injustice, with our thoughts, words and actions conscientious.”

JusticeHuman RightsEqualityDiscriminationService Of HumanityHumanitarianismEgalitarianismDeclaration Of JusticeDeclaration Of HumanityDeclaration Of Humanitarianism
Book:Operation Justice: To Make A Society That Needs No Law
Create image

“THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age. Beyond this, there was another implication of which the framers of the declaration were only half aware. The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society.”

Human RightsTotalitarianism1967Secular StateDeclaration Of The Rights Of Man
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
Create image

“Universal healthcare, free education, access to decent and affordable housing, safe working conditions, and occupations that provide a sense of fulfillment and meaning are all pretty basic and fundamental concerns, yet, for far too many of us, what are really relatively unambitious requirements have become aspirations we can only dream of.”

CommunityRaceRacismHuman RightsSocialismWhite SupremacyCommunity EmpowermentUniversal Healthcare
Book:What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice
Create image

“By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.”

DemocracyRevolutionHuman RightsHaitiHaitian Revolution
Book:Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
Create image

“Our Arab mothers and sisters are suffering from injustices like domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriages and honour killings, some are still fighting for their right to drive or travel without male custody therefore our powerful Arab media was not only expected to broadcast this particular one of a kind Women’s march it should have held panels to dissect the issues being brought forth in order for the Arab world to better understand that gender equality is not an idea that one believes in, it is a planned movement that requires an enormous effort on the part of both men and women to reach.”

FeminismHuman RightsFeministWomen S RightsDomestic ViolenceGender EqualityFemale EmpowermentDomestic AbuseGender InequalityArab MediaWomen S March
Author:Aysha Taryam
Create image

“Real third world countries where proper democracy is still a dream, like England, China, Russia, North Korea and so on, they may fight to attain true democracy, but the nations that have had democracy for some time now, it's time for them to take the next step in the course of uplift. Which is what? Individual accountability. Which comes through how? Through absolute unification of the heart and the world.”

RevolutionHuman RightsTyrannyOppressionAccountabilityDictatorshipSocial ResponsibilityPolitical ScienceSocial StudiesConstitutional Monarchy
Book:Dervish Advaitam: Gospel of Sacred Feminines and Holy Fathers
Create image

“He was an innocent Black boy in Mississippi Minding his business, going to the store He became a Civil Rights movement icon Emmett Till’s spirit continues to roar This 14-year-old boy was lynched Because of a woman named Carolyn Bryant Who said that he flirted and whistled at her But it was a lie meant to help evil stir”

JusticeHatredSocial JusticeHuman RightsDiscriminationCivil RightsDeep SouthJim Crow LawsEmmett Till
Book:Turn The Tables
Create image

“This may sound naive, but I didn't fully imagine that little girls grow up in this country with stories like yours. And that, I am sure, you are not the only one. That little girls grow up in tents and start smoking cigarettes by age eight. So seamlessly have we (those in power) written over stories and lives like yours that, to someone like me, it is very easy not to hear about lives like yours. Not to know or imagine they exist. Not to know that public policy is failing you. Not to know that the prison system is an impoverished and wholly inadequate response to your experience and that it, too, is failing you. Which means it's failing all of us.”

Social JusticePrisonHuman RightsMass IncarcerationCriminal Justice ReformPrison Reform
Book:I Have Waited for You: Letters from Prison
Create image

“Sie wenden sich gern ab oder lesen nicht weiter, wenn sie nur das Wort "Trans" hören oder ein Sternchen oder einen Unterstrich sehen – als verdienten Phänomene oder Menschen, die es seltener gibt, keine Aufmerksamkeit oder Wertschätzung. Als reichte die eigene Empathie nicht oder als sollte sie nicht reichen. Dabei ist es vielen bei den eher unwahrscheinlichen Figuren aus dem Kosmos von z.b. Shakespeare (...) ganz selbstverständlich, sich einzufühlen und ihre Geschichten verstehen zu wollen. Selten heißt schließlich nicht seltsam oder monströs. Selten heißt nur selten. Es sind womöglich nur Menschen, über die seltener Geschichten erzählt werden. Und es sind manchmal die Menschen mit besonderen, seltenen Eigenschaften oder Erfahrungen, in deren Sehnsüchten und Kämpfen um Anerkennung sich die Verletzbarkeit als condition humaine selbst spiegelt. Und so ist es gerade die Verwundbarkeit von Transpersonen, ihre Suche nach Sichtbarkeit und Anerkennung, in der sich jene wechselseitige Abhängigkeit zeigt, die uns als Menschen allgemein kennzeichnet. Insofern berührt und betrifft die Situation von Transpersonen alle. Nicht nur diejenigen, die so leben und empfinden wie sie. Die Rechte von Transpersonen sind so wichtig wie alle Menschenrechte, und sie zu begründen und zu verteidigen gehört zur Selbstverständlichkeit universalistischen Denkens.”

Human RightsLgbtqQueerTransMenschenrechte
Book:Gegen den Hass
Create image

“Freedom of speech is a fallacy, it is not absolute. It can be hailed absolute only if the person possessing it, has the conscience to distinguish the right from the wrong, justice from injustice, acceptance from discrimination.”

AcceptanceBrainy QuotesHuman RightsEqualityDiscriminationBigotryFree SpeechFreedom Of SpeechStereotypesFreedom Of Speech Quotes
Book:Citizens of Peace: Beyond the Savagery of Sovereignty
Create image

“At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.' In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.”

Human RightsArgentinaHenry KissingerJorge Rafael VidelaDeath SquadsJacobo Timerman
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
Create image

“This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget.”

Life LessonsHumanityHuman RightsToleranceAnimal RightsBeauty Of LifeIndustrializationWesternizationLabor Camp
Book:The Roots of Heaven
Create image

“Youth are not just the leaders of tomorrow; they are the catalysts for change today." "True justice lies in creating spaces where every voice, no matter how quiet, can be heard." "Inclusive development begins with acknowledging the power of diversity in every corner of society." "Advocacy is not a profession; it is a responsibility we owe to the generations that come after us." "Empowering young minds is the key to unlocking a future built on innovation, compassion, and resilience." "Laws shape society, but it is the values of fairness and equality that breathe life into them." "A sustainable future is crafted when policy, people, and purpose align." "Strengthening civic engagement is not just about building informed citizens; it’s about nurturing empowered communities." "In every challenge lies an opportunity for growth, and in every voice, a spark for change." "Human rights are not negotiable; they are the foundation upon which we build a just society.”

Social JusticeHuman RightsAsiaGovernanceAdvocacyCivic EngagementYouth DevelopmentLegal ResearchInclusive DevelopmentPolicy Analysis
Author:Panha Vorng
Create image

“I helped negotiate the end to the hunger strike. I asked for better meals and time for rec. We got five extra minutes each week. I wasn't the general they thought I was--I wasn't even a leader--but I had found my role in this place: To feel the pain of others. To stick up for those who were beaten. And to try to make our lives better.”

AmericaLeadershipHuman RightsSolidarityHuman Rights ViolationGuantanamoGuantanamo BayWarm Crime
Book:Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo
Create image

“No one wanted to be a block leader because as soon as interrogators found out about them, they disappeared to interrogations and then to solitary confinement. The professor was smart and told brothers to make someone else block leader and he would advise them. So they asked me. I wasn't a leader. I wasn't an instigator. I was young and, like most men my age, I was still learning; I was clever, but not wise yet. I was just a simple tribal man who couldn't sit by and watch other men and boys get abused and mistreated.”

LeadershipHuman RightsSolidarityWar CrimesGuantanamoGuantanamo Bay
Book:Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo
Create image

“Do you as Germans feel any guilt for what the Germans did?’ he will ask them. They will go off into groups and have heated discussions among themselves, and then come back to him with their thoughts. ‘Yes, we are Germans, and Germans perpetrated this,’ some students once told him, echoing what others have said. ‘And, though it wasn’t just Germans, it is the older Germans who were here who should feel guilt. We were not here. We ourselves did not do this. But we do feel that, as the younger generation, we should acknowledge and accept the responsibility. And for the generations that come after us, we should be the guardians of the truth.”

Human RightsGermanyNaziAmerican SlaveryWhite Guilt
Book:Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Create image

“The irony of the present day is, the more human rights jurisprudence seems to be fortified, the more there are human rights violations in newer and newer forms and some recidivism all due to the conflicting deductions of protecting even human rights of offenders. No doubts offenders deserve their rights to be protected but in cases of serious offenses such as ‘rape’ where the offender consciously commits the act while being aware of the justice system in his particular country, prefers to cross the precincts of the law. Worst still, is increasing crime rate of offenses such as rape committed against children and infants.”

HumanityHuman RightsHuman Rights OrganisationInternational Human Rights LawHuman Rights Act 1993
Author:Henrietta Newton Martin;Sr Legal Consultant & Author in Law
Create image

“Stop calling it war, for war implies faults on both sides. It's an invasion, where the state of Russia is the aggressor and the people of Ukraine are the victim. And stop saying that your prayers are with the Ukrainian people, for prayers may give you comfort, but it does nothing to alleviate their suffering. Shred all hypocritical advocacy of human rights and be involved in a meaningful way that actually helps the victims of Russian imperialism.”

Human RightsOccupationColonialismInvasionWar And PeaceHumanitarian CrisisHumanitarian AidRussian ImperialismRussia And Ukraine Conflict
Author:Abhijit Naskar
Create image

“Today we demand justice for the oppressed. We no longer accept atrocities as the inescapable fate of the defenceless. We desire and expect a better future. But when confronted with the enormity of injustice and what it demands of us, we retreat into the familiar ritual of intellectualization and moral posturing, recycling lofty liberal ideals from a safe distance. We avoid the intimate knowledge of suffering without which we will never understand the imperative of human rights.”

InjusticeHuman RightsOppressionAbstractionDistancingIntellectualizationTheorizing
Book:In Search of A Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey
Create image

“The Angola 3. Held in Solitary confinement for 40+ years each. The Closed Cell Restriction (CCR) block, where Herman and Albert were imprisioned, housed solitary cases on two tiers, with around 13 cells per tier. The cells were no more than nine by six feet, and prisoners were confined 23 hours a day, only getting out for a shower or solo exercise in the yard. Imagine, for a minute, being forced to live in your bathroom for the rest of your life.”

TruthHuman RightsActivismAttributed No SourceSolitary ConfinementAngola 3Miscarriage Of Justice
Author:Gordon Roddick
Create image