Best Civil Rights Quotes

I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

I never intend to adjust myself to injustice.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

Their appetite is the same. Their motives are the same. It’s only their mannerisms and methods that differ.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

What really matters is not whether we have problems, but how we go through them. We must keep going on to make it through whatever we are facing.

People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

We are here today because we are tired. We are tired of being seared in the withering flames of injustice.

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.

Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness.

Anyone who said he wasn’t afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn’t shake but inside I was shaking.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights.

In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.

The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights… Nothing, however, is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.

The next step has to be the necessary step. It’s always to put the immigrant community and the civil rights movement ahead of partisan politics.

Each state, so that it does not abridge the great fundamental rights belonging, under the Constitution, to all citizens, may grant or withhold such civil rights as it pleases; all that is required is that, in this respect, its laws shall be impartial.

In fact, James Meredith who was once the icon of the civil rights movement. He supported me for governor!

The bill neither confers nor abridges the rights of anyone but simply declares that in civil rights there shall be equality among all classes of citizens and that all alike shall be subject to the same punishment.

This [EURO] was never a hate group, the European American Unity and Rights Organization was an organization in its charter is dedicated to true civil rights and stopping discrimination against people, that the best qualified people should be engaged and that every people have the right to preserve their heritage, their freedom and their values.

I would have to say all of the civil rights acts, because there were three, and even, say, the Immigration Act, which I think also is a civil rights act, maybe on a global perspective, that he cared very, very much about it.

Children’s liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.

Remember the vast majority of the Democrats as well as all the Republicans in the House of Representatives in Louisiana voted for my signature-piece of legislation in the house which was a bill, actually a bill for true civil rights. That there must be no discrimination against anyone on the basis of race in affirmative-action.

At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.

When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word ‘I’ carried a lot of fright for me.

…Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non- violent…. They must harass, debate, petition, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps–and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities…. The acceptance of our condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children [ellipses in source].

I don’t call myself a white supremacist. I’m a civil rights activist concerned about European-American rights.

Most Americans who made it past the fourth grade have a pretty good idea who Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were. Not many Americans have even heard of Alice Paul, Howard W. Smith, and Martha Griffiths. But they played almost as big a role in the history of women’s rights as Marshall and King played in the history of civil rights for African-Americans. They gave women the handle to the door to economic opportunity, and nearly all the gains women have made in that sphere since the nineteen-sixties were made because of what they did.

I think if you are a black person or an Hispanic person, you are not as fond of Rudolph Giuliani as you are if you happen to be a white person. Because he has trampled on people’s civil rights.

But there are a couple of places where it is clear to me that there should be no ambiguity of corporate responsibility – the environment and civil rights, .. As a corporation, you cannot let the desire for unanimity override your obligation for fairness.

Every person with a pulse has a responsibility to stand in solidarity with the Muslim community that is on the front lines fighting against groups like ISIS, both militarily and ideologically, every day, and now on the front line of standing up for civil liberties and civil rights to make America great. [They] are the best insurance for the safety of all Americans.

Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.