As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

The Arab population of Palestine are victims of genocidal actions; their lands are confiscated or deprived of water supplies in the semi-desert areas, and their homes are destroyed with heavy wrecking equipment.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

As soon as you set foot on a yacht you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

I was the first tenured woman at Columbia. That was 1972; every law school was looking for its woman. Why? Because Stan Pottinger, who was then head of the office for civil rights of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, was enforcing the Nixon government contract program.

The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

I used to always fight for human rights. I still fight for Leonard Peltier, who’s spent 35 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

I believe that we should own the fruits of our labor and the assets of our creations.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

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.

If you’re white and you’re wrong, then you’re wrong; if you’re black and you’re wrong, you’re wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green – God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don’t contract them.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.

Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny.

No one doubts that innocent men, women and children have been the victims of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. And there’s no doubt who is responsible for this heinous use of chemical weapons in Syria: the Syrian regime.

I will not sit in a room with black people when the N word is used. I know it was meant to belittle a person, so I will not sit there and have that poison put on me. Now a black person can say, ‚Oh, you know, I can use this word because I’m black.‘

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I’ve always done it in private.

I don’t think marriage is a civil right, but I think that being able to transfer property is a civil right.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

Managing your own property can be a full-time job.

Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

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

Freedom is not enough.

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we’re probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

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.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated on the job.

What has happened at Guantanamo Bay… does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.

World belongs to humanity, not this leader, that leader or that king or prince or religious leader. World belongs to humanity.

Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

We who follow the teachings of Elijah Muhammad don’t want to be forced to integrate. Integration is wrong. We don’t want to live with the white man; that’s all.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.