Human Rights Quotes

The Middle East is the birthplace of three great religions—Moslem, Christian and Hebrew. Mecca and Jerusalem are more than places on the map. They symbolize religions which teach that the spirit has supremacy over matter and that the individual has a dignity and rights of which no despotic government can rightfully deprive him.

The future must see the broadening of human rights throughout the world. People who have glimpsed freedom will never be content until they have secured it for themselves.

Democracy, freedom, human rights have come to have a definite meaning to the people of the world which we must not allow any nation to so change that they are made synonymous with suppression and dictatorship.

I think in any movement, for human rights, you’ve got to transcend gender, and you’ve got to consider who’s making the accusation and why and when, because it matters.

No President has ever done more for human rights than I have.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

And is not peace, in the last analyses, basically a matter of human rights? The right to live out our lives without fear of devastation? The right to breathe air as nature provided it? The right of future generations to a healthy existence?

In 1982, a group came to the Senate to discuss “human rights in Guatemala” with interested staffers. They accused the military government of a litany of abuses, many of which had been widely reported in the American media. When they finished, I asked them about reports, which I had brought along in a stack almost […]

Here, then, I arrive at that doctrine of human rights which seems to me to be most in accord with the inflexible and beneficient laws of nature… Of these rights there are two classes – first, those which a man (or a class of men) wrests from his environment by force; and secondly, those which […]