Quotes on Civil Rights

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.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

Virginia States' rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states' rights today are not those seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. The time is long past — if indeed it ever existed — when we should permit the noble concept of states' rights to be betrayed.

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.

Everything hinges on education. Without it, you can't advocate for proper health care, for housing, for a civil rights bill that ensures your rights.

Evil must be attacked by. . . the day to day assault of the battering rams of justice.

Our wish is that...[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.

I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, the classroom is the place to start. Great teaching is about so much more than education; it is a daily fight for social justice.

Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.

I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi.

In the current struggle, there is one positive course of action. There is no alternative, for the alternative would connote a rear march.

I am - Somebody. I may be poor, but I am - Somebody! I may be on welfare, but I am - Somebody! I may be uneducated, but I am - Somebody! I must be, I'm God's child. I must be respected and protected. I am black and I am beautiful! I am - Somebody! Soul Power!

Every society, all government, and every kind of civil compact therefore, is or ought to be, calculated for the general good and safety of the community.

The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.

This is a crucial time in the fight for corporate civil rights. Just look at the hateful signs at Occupy Wallstreet: 'Corporations Are Not People!' Wow, I thought we were past the point in this country where some people aren't people just because they have different color skin or different religion or were born in a lawyer's office, only exist on paper, have no soul and can never die.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights.

Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.

There's no problem on the planet that can't be solved without violence. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement.

I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendency of one sect over another.

Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it.

The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.