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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.

There’s no question that the black middle class has benefited greatly by the civil rights movement. But there is a large black underclass that does not have access to jobs. If there’s no clear road to income and status except crime, we should expect social problems. You can’t solve this problem without addressing the economic issues, and the same is true with gender.

Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life.

The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important ’cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate.

Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

My great grandmother threw herself in front of a bus. The police tried to say she was committed suicide but the family knew she was just trying to stop civil rights.

The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill.

Reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.

The war on drugs to me is absolutely phoney, its so obviously phoney, ok? It’s a war against our civil rights, that’s all it is. They’re using it to make us afraid to go out at night, afraid of each other, so that we lock ourselves in our homes and they get suspending our rights one by one.

Quakers are known for wanting to give back. Ban the bomb and the civil rights movement and the native American struggle for justice – those things were very, very front-burner in my childhood, as were the ideas of working for peace and if you have more than you need, then you share it with people who don’t.

I think everybody should get married. Boys and girls. Girls and boys. Boys and boys! Girls and girls! Shouldn’t we all be entitled to a family-Civil rights baby it’s civil rights. It doesn’t get any better here in Berkeley I’ll tell you that.

…Sean Penn claimed to be ‘serv[ing] the country’ by giving aid and comfort to an enemy about to be attacked by the US. He said it made him feel more patriotic to dissent from the war aims of his nation. It is at least a counterintuitive position. Most people would not instantly grasp how it is more patriotic to always root against America. White supremacists should try claiming that burning crosses is more supportive of civil rights than not burning them.

I am a Minnesotan, and not just because I root for the Vikings and the Twins. I like the Minnesota-nice sensibility. I like the liberal tradition; I like the Hubert Humphrey tradition fighting for civil rights.

A war of words escalated between the president-elect and a civil rights icon. Donald Trump fired back at democratic Congressman John Lewis after Lewis said he did not see Trump as a legitimate president.

I say further that for this great legislative body to ignore the Constitution and the fundamental concepts of our governmental system is to act in a manner which could ultimately destroy the freedom of all American citizens, including the freedoms of the very persons whose feelings and whose liberties are the major subject of this legislation.

The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own. I have found the anti-slavery cause to be … the school in which human rights are more fully investigated and better understood and taught than in any other.

I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.

I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience