Quotes on Rights

The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.

Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

Gays and lesbians began to gain civil rights when Americans realized that their brothers, cousins, daughters were gay.

In Saudi Arabia - recognized as one of the worst violators of women's rights - women outnumber men on university campuses and yet are treated like minors who need a male guardian's permission to do the most basic things.

If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, 'Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty.' In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean.

What we need in Africa is balanced development. Economic success cannot be a replacement for human rights or participation or democracy... it doesn't work.

But my father also supported human rights, freedom and self-determination for all people, including Latino agricultural workers, Native Americans, and the millions of impoverished white men and women who were treated as second-class citizens.

The seminal right of the modern civil rights movement was the right to vote. My father fought so diligently for it. Certainly Congressman John Lewis and many others, Hosea Williams, fought for it as well.

There is a fantasy as old as the modern gay rights movement that if all our skins turned lavender overnight, the majority, confounded by our numbers and our diversity, and recognising a few of our faces, would at once let go of prejudice forevermore.

Either somebody has equal rights, or they don't. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There's no mention of a man and a woman.

The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what happened was that a lot of very right-wing Democrats, after the civil rights bill of 1964, left the Democratic Party and gradually have taken over the Republican Party.

ISIL struck France because it is 'free' and 'the nation of human rights'. This is not a war of civilisation, as these assassins don't have any. This is a war against the jihadist menace that threatens not just France.

Even though we may focus first on the rights of our own country, that does not mean that we should disregard the rights of everyone else.

While most men don't have first-hand experience with gender-based discrimination, we can still be powerful allies for advancing women's rights. We need to do a better job of listening to women and standing up for what's right, even when it's not popular or comfortable.

By strengthening the three pillars of the United Nations - security, development and human rights - we can build a more peaceful, more prosperous and more just world for our succeeding generations.

Women's rights are human rights.

We would be false to our trust if we allowed the time it takes to give effect to constitutional rights to be used as the very reason for taking away those rights.

If women's rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Quran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.

If we could begin to look at water pollution as a human rights violation, and we could begin to look at criminal aspects of this, I think that could be a game changer for many companies who want to not be forthwith and think that they can just hold off in a lawsuit for 10 years, and in the meantime, people are still being poisoned.

This is our country, our water. We're entitled to a good life. It's a human rights issue.

The thing that I would say you get the most hate about on social media, in my experience, is if you tweet anything about women's rights or feminism. It blows my mind. But it's the thought of not being a feminist that actually blows my mind.