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human Rights Quotes

• “Young friends all over the world, you are the ones who must realize these rights,
now and for all time. Their fate and future is in your hands.” —Kofi Annan, former
Secretary-General, United Nations

• “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

• “The only thing necessary for the triumph of Evil is for good men to do nothing.”
—Edmund Burke, Irish statesman

• “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
—Evelyn Beatrice Hall expressing the thoughts of Voltaire

• “Racism is a grown-up disease and we must stop using our children to spread it.”
—Ruby Bridges, civil rights activist

• “My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”

—Adlai E. Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 1960–1965

• “Human rights must be made a fact, not an idealistic dream.” —L. Ron Hubbard,
American author and humanitarian

• “You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make
yourself do right in spite of your feelings.” —Pearl S. Buck, Pulitzer Prize-winning
American author

• “Fear is not the natural state of civilized people.” —Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991
Nobel Peace Prize winner, Burma (Myanmar)

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 H UMAN R IGHTS Q UOTES

• “Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is

essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.”
—The Dalai Lama

• “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” —Mahatma Gandhi

• “I have learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.
The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
—Nelson Mandela, 1993 Nobel Peace Prize winner

• “If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic and emotionally
stable third of mankind, all races would be represented.” —Franz Boas,
Anthropologist

• “The social progress, order, security and peace of each country are necessarily
connected with the social progress, order, security and peace of all other countries.”
— Pope John the XXIII (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli)

• “Ignorance is an evil weed … which no democracy can afford among its citizens.”
—William Henry Beveridge, British economist

• “Even if each person could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children;
they are born free men; their liberty belongs to them and no one has the right to
dispose of it except themselves.” —Jean Jacques Rousseau, French philosopher
and author

• “Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent …”
—Eleanor Roosevelt, U.S. diplomat and author, wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt

• “Weapons do not fire on their own. Those who have lost hope fire them.”
—Dr. Oscar Arias Sánchez, President, Costa Rica

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