I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities.

The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.

Honesty is the best policy.

The conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time – 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning. They didn’t have toilets in the fields; they didn’t have cold drinking water. They didn’t have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

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.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.

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

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

Duty cannot exist without faith.

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

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.

There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‚sophisticated‘ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

I’ve used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I’ve still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

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

I think what you’re seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they’ve got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out.

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.

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 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.

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it’s again not people who are intrinsically evil.

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

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.

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

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

We all have the duty to do good.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, ‚I’m a representative.‘

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Guantanamo is still open, but it’s unlikely that serious torture is going on at Guantanamo. There is just too much inspection.

I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

Freedom is not enough.

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

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.

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

And every human being is precious.

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

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

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.

I was standing on a ladder outside the Homestead juvenile immigrant detention center outside Miami, looking over the fence, and I saw children lined up like prisoners. They had been separated from their families and put in this private detention facility. It was horrible.

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

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

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

I’m not for gay marriage, but I’m not for discriminating against people.

You can’t put democracy and freedom back into a box.

DACA recipients risk a lot to come out of the shadows & sign up, but many will tell you the risk is worth being able to live and work in the only country they’ve ever known as home. DACA recipients serve in our military, work in Fortune 100 companies, and conduct important medical research.

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.