Civil Rights Quotes

My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not denied by any majority. My rights are because I exist.

If the system were designed to protect adoptees, why do so many have to fight for their rights?

The unfortunate reality is that, even today, too many citizens have reason to fear that their right to vote, their access to the ballot--and their ability to have their votes counted--is under threat." --Eric Holder, quoted in Give Us the Ballot

Ari Berman

It [freedom] rings bells to remind humanity that the most precious gifts in life––like children and love and time––must never be taken for granted.

Aberjhani

You cannot stand for civil rights + not support gay marriage. You cannot stand for human rights + not support gay marriage. It's that simple.Everywhere, the voice of the oppressed must echo + ring out or else it will be crushed by the tyranny of wickedness.

Bernard Schaffer

Freedom rings bells to wake us from the comfort of beautiful dreams and empower the efforts that turn them into reality.

Aberjhani

In its essence, Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is one citizen’s soul-searing plea with his countrymen––Whites and Blacks––to recognize that racial disparities fueled by unwarranted bigotry were crippling America’s ability to shine as a true beacon of democracy in a world filled with people groping their way through suffocating shadows of political turmoil, economic oppression, military mayhem, starvation, and disease.

Aberjhani

A voteless people is a hopeless people.

Amelia Boynton Robinson

You don't have to stand up for your rights to get justice, sometimes you can sit for your rights like Rosa Parks.

Harmon Okinyo

Adoptee rights are everyone's rights, and they deserve to be protected.

DaShanne Stokes

Self defense is the inherent right of an individual to repel any unwarranted attack. Governments are not individuals and should not have the power to restrict or invalidate a person's ability to defend him/herself.

GunFreeZone.net

In terms of our elected officials, I think we need to ask...: How far should we go with our need to know before we completely veer off into the personal and the private and leave behind any chance of having a legitimate debate or discussion or discourse about the issues at hand?

John Lewis

A tense account of the perils facing those who sought freedom in the lead-up to the Civil War.

Publisher’s Weekly

I was in the kitchen drinking coffee when I heard Coretta cry, "Martin, Martin, come quickly!" I put down my cup and ran toward the living room. As I approached the front window Coretta pointed joyfully to a slowly moving bus: "Darling, it's empty!

Martin Luther King Jr.

According to court records, during the siege at Wounded Knee, more than two hundred and fifty thousand rounds were fired at our people by U.S. marshalls, FBI agents, the tribal police, the GOONs, and white vigilantes. These boys weren't kidding. And neither were we.

Leonard Peltier

Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still freeand we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?

Cory Doctorow

There are no secrets on the Internet

Paul Babicki

How can you ask someone to live in the world and not have something to say about injustice?

John Carlos

Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million people. I beg you to recognize human life draped in a form and guise alien to ours, but springing from a soil plowed and sown by our own hands. I ask you to recognize laws and processes flowing from such a condition, understand them, seek to change them. If we do none of these, then we should not pretend horror or surprise when thwarted life expresses itself in fear and hate and crime.

Richard Wright

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Martin Luther King Jr.

You have to join every other movement for the freedom of people.

Bayard Rustin

When we hide discrimination under the guise of 'religious freedom,' we make a mockery of human rights.

DaShanne Stokes

People believe what they want to believe. Even if it isn’t true.

Julian Houston

The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.

William F. Buckley Jr.

...A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment--with its redefinition of personhood--is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.

Charles Stross

I do not think I was a hothead—not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life.

Pat Conroy

Only a "dry as dust" religion prompts a minister to extol the glories of Heaven while ignoring the social conditions that cause men an Earthly hell.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don't care who reads them.

Augusta Scattergood

Lush, detailed, total-immersion storytelling.–Kirkus Review

Sharon Lovejoy

The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens – American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did – consume. Now they don’t use those words any more – it’s the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes.

Toni Morrison

The 20th Century proved that there is nothing more dangerous to the health of ethnic minority communities than big government.

A.E. Samaan

A second line is in effect a civil rights demonstration. Literally, demonstrating the civil right of the community to assemble in the street for peaceful purposes. Or, more simply, demonstrating the civil right of the community to exist.

Ned Sublette

There will always be people afraid of the monsters in the night. They are usually the ones that look for them because they have proven they exist in themselves.

Shannon L. Alder

Mental illness is not something you misunderstand in this era. Get educated because bias is no different than racism.

Shannon L. Alder

When asked what gave her the strength and commitment to refuse segregation, (Rosa) Parks credited her mother and grandfather "for giving me the spirit of freedom... that I should not feel because of my race or color, inferior to any person. That I should do my very best to be a respectable person, to respect myself, to expect respect from others.

Jeanne Theoharis

I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction beyond that.

Joe Biden

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Rosa Parks

I am an educated black woman in a time when educated black people will be called upon to risk everything for the rights of black people everywhere.

Allan Dare Pearce

There are all kinds of ways to be in the world. And no matter what has happened to us, or what we have been told, or what we have believed, we get to choose our way.

Deborah Wiles

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

Lyndon B. Johnson

I recall Ghandi said ultimately all things devolve into the political, but I'd argue that all things devolve into pro-people and anti-people. And I can pose the question, which side are you on?

Stetson Kennedy

There is more than one way to be Kluxed, and we need to think about ourselves and the kind of people we elect into public office.

Stetson Kennedy

The bed sheet brigade is bad enough, but the real threat to Americans and human rights today is the plain clothes Klux in the halls of government and certain black-robed Klux on court benches.

Stetson Kennedy

I, too, sing America.I am the darker brother.They send me to eat in the kitchenWhen company comes,But I laugh,And eat well,And grow strong.Tomorrow,I'll be at the tableWhen company comes.Nobody'll dareSay to me,"Eat in the kitchen,"Then.Besides,They'll see how beautiful I amAnd be ashamed--I, too, am America.

Langston Hughes

The Algerians were revolutionsists, they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France, to hell with Fance, they wanted some land, not some France.

Malcolm X

[O]ur revolt was as much against the traditional black leadership structure as it was against segregation and discrimination.

John Lewis

The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not.

Alice Walker

TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT hate white people.TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT have more than one wife.TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT smoke marijuana or do any other types of drugsTRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT have to stand on corners Intimidating people into believing the way.

Alex Hartley Jr.

[T]he full and complete development of a country, the welfare of the world and the cause of peace require the maximum participation of women on equal terms with men in all fi

United Nations

Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.

A.E. Samaan

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.

Howard Zinn

But what's braver?' Emmanuel said. 'Naming the bigots and possibly being killed for it? Or living in silence in order to protect yourself and those you love?' I think bravery had more to do with making the choice and less to do with the choice it self. In that situation, bravery was both living and dying.

Janelle Gray

Initially, the purveyors of racism need no more than the silent acquiescence of the public ... [I]t is never too soon to confront bigotry and racism whenever, wherever, and in whatever form it raises its ugly head. It is incumbent upon all people to confront even the slightest hint of racist thought or action with zero tolerance.

Hans J. Massaquoi

It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was never, quite, my own idea of myself - and Malcolm was considered to be a "racist in reverse." This formulation, in terms of power - and power is the arena in which racism is acted out - means absolutely nothing: it may even be described as a cowardly formulation. The powerless, by definition, can never be "racists," for they can never make the world pay for what they feel or fear except by the suicidal endeavor which makes them fanatics or revolutionaries, or both.

James Baldwin

…in recent history the Democrat Party has created the illusion that their agenda and their policies are what’s best for black people. Somehow it’s been forgotten that the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement with one simple creed: that slavery is a violation of the rights of man.

Elbert Guillory

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' "I said: 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.

Dick Gregory

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface hidden tension that is already alive

Martin Luther King Jr.

We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Segregation in the American South was bankrolled by the wealthy eugenicist from the Northeast, Wickliffe Draper.

A.E. Samaan

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Civil Rights Quotes

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