Quotes on Human Rights

The ultimate destiny of the human race is the greatest moral perfection, provided that it is achieved through human freedom, whereby alone man is capable of the greatest happiness.

From the Balkans to Africa, from Asia to the Middle East, we have witnessed the weakening or absence of effective governance leading to the ravaging of human rights and the abandonment of longstanding humanitarian principles. We need competent and responsible states to meet the needs of "we the peoples" for whom the UN was created. And the world's peoples will not be fully served unless peace, development and human rights, the three pillars of the UN, are advanced together with equal vigour.

Democracy is based on the majority principle. This is especially true in a country such as ours where the vast majority have been systematically denied their rights. At the same time, democracy also requires that the rights of political and other minorities be safeguarded.

It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so.

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

We believe that human rights transcend boundaries and must prevail over state sovereignty.

And we who have toiled for freedom's law, have we sought for freedom's soul? Have we learned at last that human right is not a part but the whole?

The Universal Declaration... as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations...it not only crystallizes the political thought of our times on these matters, but it has also influenced the thinking of legislators all over the world.

Begin with duties of a man and rights will follow as spring follows winter

Establish democracy at home, based on human rights as superior to property rights. . . .

It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man.

Commit yourself to the noble struggle for human rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country and a finer world to live in.

Human rights without responsibility, without a sense of decency, a sense of compassion, is not good enough for a society to flourish... We need to broaden our scope from the legalistic language to the language of the heart.

Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights.

In a few decades, the relationship between the environment, resources and conflict may seem almost as obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and peace.

Credit is a human right that should be treated as a human right. If credit can be accepted as a human right, then all other human rights will be easier to establish.

You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. _x000D_ _x000D_ You can kill a man, but not an idea.

Basically we could not have peace, or an atmosphere in which peace could grow, unless we recognized the rights of individual human beings... their importance, their dignity... and agreed that was the basic thing that had to be accepted throughout the world.

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world ... Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them.

There is no road to freedom, freedom is the road.