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Please enjoy these quotes about Civil Rights from my collection of quotes and sayings.
A great democracy does not make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon.
- William J. Clinton
Related topics: Government Political Gun Guns Voting Gun-Control
Do feuds ever end?
Only when both sides shake hands,
and agree that there is no winner, no loser,
only people who have wearied of fighting
and desire to live in peace.
For many years, Northern Ireland was locked
in a murderous and seemingly unending feud.
The key to ending the feud was a shared commitment
that peace was more important than vengeance.
That is always the choice to be made.
The organizers of an April 10, 2009
joint Protestant-Catholic commemoration
of the Northern Ireland dead,
comprised of members of the once-outlawed Sinn Fein
as well as their once-avowed enemies,
referred to, "the terrible, random nature
of death in war and civil conflict."
Some lessons have been learned, many more remain.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Majority rule only works if you're also
considering individual rights,
because you can't have five wolves and one sheep
voting on what to have for dinner.
- Larry Flynt
If I am happy in spite of my deprivations,
if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith,
so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life.
If, in short, I am an optimist,
my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
- Helen Keller
...
Helen Keller (1880-1968) overcame being both deaf and blind
to become a famous author, lecturer, and activist
for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and ending war.
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Thank You,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Property is intended to serve life,
and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect,
it has no personal being.
It is part of the earth man walks on.
It is not man.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
The highest result of education is tolerance.
Long ago men fought and died for their faith;
but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, -
the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren
and their rights of conscience.
- Helen Keller
Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent
and unalienable rights of man.
- Thomas Jefferson
Rights that do not flow from duty
well performed are not worth having.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule,
where fifty-one percent of the people
may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
- attributed to Thomas Jefferson
A Bill of Rights is what the people are
entitled to against every government,
and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.
- Thomas Jefferson
The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing
and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
America did not invent human rights.
In a very real sense, it is the other way around.
Human rights invented America.
- Jimmy Carter
Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy,
because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.
- Jimmy Carter
There is no person in this room whose basic rights
are not involved in any successful defiance
to the carrying out of court orders.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle,
that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail,
that will to be rightful must be reasonable;
that the minority possess their equal rights,
which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
- Thomas Jefferson
I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting
some false and most pernicious notions about consistency -
and to such a degree that the average man has
turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around
and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized,
where it should be his humiliation.
- Mark Twain
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
- Thomas Jefferson
For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival,
liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness
is a planet whose resources are devoted
to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.
- Jimmy Carter
The slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.
But such is the irresistible nature of truth,
that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.
- Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will
within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.
I do not add "within the limits of the law"
because law is often but the tyrant's will,
and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
- Thomas Jefferson
Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen
who would protect the rights and privileges of free people
and who would preserve what is
good and fruitful in our national heritage.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I'm actually starting to like more and more people
who have convictions that are unpopular.
Now at what point does an unpopular conviction
interfere with your own human rights?
Forced female circumcision, for instance.
The Catholic Church's stance on contraception.
The list goes on. You know, God has some really weird kids,
and I find it hard to be in their company most of the time.
- Bono
This [the Holocaust] must never happen again. ...
Be vigilant about your rights.
Care about the rights and human dignity of others.
When the rights of any group, no matter how small,
no matter how marginal, are violated,
your liberty, your freedom is put at risk.
Let there never be a day when we cast about in horror
and have to ask the question, "How did it ever come to this?"
- Thomas Childers, Ph.D., Professor of History,
University of Pennsylvania, in the closing remarks
of his six-hour Teaching Company audio lecture series
The minority is always stronger than the majority,
because the minority is generally formed by those
who really have an opinion.
- Soren Kierkegaard
One man with courage makes a majority.
- old saying probably repeated by Andrew Jackson
(falsely attributed to Jefferson)
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,
it is time to pause and reflect.
- Mark Twain
The majority of men meet with failure
because of their lack of persistence
in creating new plans to take
the place of those which fail.
- Napoleon Hill
In matters of conscience,
the law of the majority has no place.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
Instead of comparing our lot with that
of those who are more fortunate than we are,
we should compare it with the lot
of the great majority of our fellow men.
It then appears that we are among the privileged.
- Helen Keller
Truth always rests with the minority,
and the minority is always stronger than the majority,
because the minority is generally formed by those
who really have an opinion,
while the strength of a majority is illusory,
formed by the gangs who have no opinion -
and who, therefore, in the next instant
(when it is evident that the minority is the stronger)
assume its opinion... while truth again reverts to a new minority.
- Soren Kierkegaard
We may consider each generation as a distinct nation,
with a right, by the will of its majority,
to bind themselves, but none to
bind the succeeding generation,
more than the inhabitants of another country.
- Thomas Jefferson
Even if you are a minority of one,
the truth is the truth.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
Almost always, the creative dedicated minority
has made the world better.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat,
for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator,
while the wolf denounces him for the same act
as the destroyer of liberty,
especially as the sheep was a black one.
Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed
upon a definition of the word liberty;
and precisely the same difference
prevails today among us human creatures
- Abraham Lincoln
Faith is taking the first step,
even when you don't see the whole staircase.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Iron rusts from disuse;
water loses its purity from stagnation...
even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
- Leonardo da Vinci
A true friend is someone who
thinks that you are a good egg
even though he knows that
you are slightly cracked.
- Bernard Meltzer
Best Friends: we're a parade - even by ourselves!
- Mary Anne Radmacher
Belief fuels our decisions -
even when we are not clearly aware of those beliefs.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
Doing an injury puts you below your enemy;
revenging one make you but even with him;
forgiving it sets you above him.
- Benjamin Franklin [attributed]
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity
opinions which differ from
the prejudices of their social environment.
Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
- Albert Einstein
We humans feel an instinctive need to know
what is coming next - what we can count upon.
We fear change - even the most positive change.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Appreciate again and again, freshly and naively,
the basic goods of life, with awe,
pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy,
however stale these experiences may have become to others.
- Abraham Maslow
Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart,
it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.
- A. A. Milne (Winnie-The-Pooh)
The trouble is,
if you don't risk anything,
you risk even more.
- Erica Jong
Life is a series of experiences,
each one of which makes us bigger,
even though sometimes it is hard to realize this.
- Henry Ford
Most of us are prisoners of habit,
and don't even notice that we do the same things,
think the same things, want the same things each day -
mostly without conscious thought.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Life does not consist mainly,
or even largely, of facts or happenings.
It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts
that is forever flowing through one's head.
- Mark Twain
To be one, to be united is a great thing.
But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.
- Bono
To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children,
to leave the world a better place,
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived,
this is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man is called to be a street sweeper,
he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted,
or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts
of heaven and earth will pause to say,
here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
I have found that hollow,
which even I had relied on for solid.
- Henry David Thoreau
People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand
my complaint about them not understanding me.
- Soren Kierkegaard
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness,
and the word happy would lose its meaning
if it were not balanced by sadness.
It is far better take things as they come along
with patience and equanimity.
- Carl Jung
Not everyone is always going to like what you do.
Your job application, your book proposal,
your offer of marriage is going to
get rejected sometimes - perhaps often.
Your boss, your spouse, even the person
behind you in the supermarket checkout line
is occasionally going to think that you are doing it all wrong.
Don't take it personally.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
You can do what you have to do,
and sometimes you can do it
even better than you think you can.
- Jimmy Carter
Truth stands, even if there be no public support.
It is self-sustained.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
If you have health, you probably will be happy,
and if you have health and happiness,
you have all the wealth you need, even if it is not all you want.
- Elbert Hubbard
Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.
- Lao Tzu
One of the greatest cause of unhappiness -
perhaps even the only cause of unhappiness - is comparison.
I remember as a young child hearing my mother say,
"Comparisons are odious."
That is one of the oldest sayings in the English language,
and one of the most important.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Farewell My Friend
It was beautiful as long as it lasted
The journey of my life.
I have no regrets whatsoever
save the pain I'll leave behind.
Those dear hearts who love and care...
And the strings pulling at the heart and soul...
The strong arms that held me up
When my own strength let me down.
At every turning of my life
I came across good friends,
Friends who stood by me,
Even when the time raced me by.
Farewell, farewell my friends
I smile and bid you goodbye.
No, shed no tears for I need them not
All I need is your smile.
If you feel sad do think of me
for that's what I'll like
when you live in the hearts
of those you love, remember then
you never die.
- Gitanjali Ghei
It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies,
but even more to stand up to your friends.
- J.K. Rowling
Violence, even well intentioned,
always rebounds upon oneself.
- Lao Tzu
The freedom we are looking for
is the freedom to be ourselves,
to express ourselves. But if we look at our lives
we will see that most of the time
we do things just to please others ...
The worst part is that most of us
are not even aware that we are not free.
- Don Miguel Ruiz
My vision of a real humanity is of pure individuals
relating to each other, but not tied in any relationship.
They will be loving to each other,
but not being possessive of each other.
They will be sharing with each other
all their joys and all their blessings,
but never even in their dreams thinking of dominating,
thinking of enslaving the other person.
- Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
Even the truth, when believed, is a lie.
You must experience the truth, not believe it.
- Werner Erhard
Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit.
Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever,
even if your whole world seems upset.
- Saint Francis de Sales
If you have no confidence in self,
you are twice defeated in the race of life.
With confidence, you have won even before you have started.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Shoot for the moon.
Even if you miss,
you'll land among the stars.
- Les Brown
The best and most beautiful things in the world
cannot be seen or even touched.
They must be felt with the heart.
- Helen Keller
The higher the sun rises, the less shadow it casts;
even so, the greater is the goodness, the less it covets praise;
yet cannot avoid its rewards in honors.
- Lao Tzu
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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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