Quotes & Sayings About Civil Rights

A freedom given up is not so easily regained. — Rivera Sun

You know, civil rights is great and everything, but a lot of people don't realize that plumbers in the South make less money than when they used to install separate drinking fountains. — Andy Kindler

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear — Aung San Suu Kyi

Yes, it is hard out there. But hard is relative. I come from a middle-class family, my parents are academics. I was born after the Civil Rights movement, I was a toddler during the women's movement, I live in the United States of America, all of which means I am allowed to own my freedom, my rights, my voice and my uterus. — Shonda Rhimes

You could not be in the civil rights movement without having an appreciation for everybody's rights. That these rights are not divisible - not something men have and women don't and so on. — Julian Bond

For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much
constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade
that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out. — Russell Shorto

I was so hungry to learn. My mother drilled this into me. When you read,she said, you know--and you can help yourself and others. — Carole Boston Weatherford

Our country as a whole, no less than the Hastings College of Law, values tolerance, cooperation, learning, and the amicable resolution of conflicts. But we seek to achieve those goals through "[a] confident pluralism that conduces to civil peace and advances democratic consensus-building," not by abridging First Amendment rights. — Samuel Alito

It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere. — Marian Wright Edelman

How did I make a living? I haven't. I have eked out an existence. - Ella Baker — Gail Collins

It's so simple: Right to marriage is a civil right, which like all civil rights should not depend on what state you happen to live in. — Annie Laurie Gaylor

I'm often accused of hiring people with civil rights experience, and I do plead guilty to that. — Thomas Perez

I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual is worse off in England as regards his private civil rights or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and hereditary titles and so forth - matters which are, of course, quite different from freedom in its proper sense. — James Bryce

I wasn't looking for notoriety [when we marched]. But if that's what it took [to get attention], I didn't care how many licks I got. It just made me even more determined to fight for our cause. — Amelia Boynton Robinson

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. — Billie Joe Armstrong

Yes. My mother was and still is a Folk Singer. She was very involved in the political movements for Unions and Civil rights. She sang with Pete Seeger among others. My father was an Actor. — Vicki Sue Robinson

I have a long history in fighting for civil rights. I understand that many people in the African-American community may not understand that. — Bernie Sanders

There are a million Negroes in Mississippi. I think they'll take care of me. — James Meredith

His in-laws, Erastus and Eloise Oppenheimer, lived in Ezra, Texas, a town tucked so deep in the woods of East Texas that time, civil rights, and wireless Internet couldn't find it. — Sharon Bayliss

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender. — Rebecca Solnit

The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future. — Marian Wright Edelman

The 'civil rights' revolutionary groups are a case in point. Their goal is not equality but power. The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power ... Voodoo or magic was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive. — R.J. Rushdoony

The ADA was a landmark civil rights legislation. It was a bill of rights for persons with disabilities, a formal acknowledgement that Americans with disabilities are Americans first and that they're entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else. — Valerie Jarrett

We wouldn't have to take your rights away if you'd just stop exercising them. — Carl-John X. Veraja

YAZIDIS AND CHRISTIANS WANT TO BE FREE OF NIGHT MIST AND BEHEADING DRIFT! — Widad Akreyi

If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings. — Mitch Kapor

No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never wavered in my support for civil rights or the civil rights act. — Rand Paul

Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. — Isabel Wilkerson

Did you know about the Democratic president who is the founder of modern progressivism - and also responsible for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan? What about the most popular Democratic president of the twentieth century - who blocked anti-lynching laws and for more than a decade cut deals with racists to exclude blacks from government programs? Then there is the president who is the hero of the Civil Rights laws - the same fellow that called blacks "niggers" and said he wanted to keep them confined to the Democratic plantation. — Dinesh D'Souza

To cheapen the lives of any group of men, cheapens the lives of all men, even our own. This is a law of human psychology, or human nature. And it will not be repealed by our wishes, nor will it be merciful to our blindness. — William Pickens

There was the old hippie-hating mad dog himself, moonlighting after a busy day of civil-rights violation, as pitchman for Channel View Estates. — Thomas Pynchon

If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door. — Harvey Milk

If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property. — Walter E. Williams

The implementation measures of both Covenants, but especially those of the Covenant concerning civil and political rights, were considerably weakened to the point where they assumed an optional character. — Rene Cassin

For some time, I've said this issue of comprehensive immigration reform is not just an issue about immigration or human rights or civil rights, it's about our economy. You take 11 million people from out of the dark and into the light. The think tanks have surmised that you are talking about trillions of dollars infused into the economy. — Antonio Villaraigosa

The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered. — Thomas Jefferson

Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don't care who reads them. — Augusta Scattergood

George W. Bush and his administration embarked on a full-scale assault on civil liberties, human rights and the rule of law, walking away from his international obligations, tearing up international treaties, protocols and UN conventions. — Bianca Jagger

Because of the Civil Rights movement, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for everybody ... Not just for blacks and whites, but also women and Latinos; and Asians and Native Americans; and gay Americans and Americans with a disability. They swung open for you, and they swung open for me. And that's why I'm standing here today-because of those efforts, because of that legacy. — Barack Obama

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights. Moore planned a "Freedom Walk" from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation. Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN. The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama - he had been shot to death. — Jeffrey K. Smith

Preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country. — Alan Keyes

Slavery wasn't a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn't a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn't a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn't a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one. — Naomi Klein

I think young people don't really know that much about the Civil Rights Movement and about the history of African Americans in this country. It's not taught enough in school. — Don Lemon

Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement. — Angela Davis

Respect for human rights requires transparent and accountable institutions and governance as well as the effective participation of all individuals and civil society, who are an essential part of realizing social and people-centred sustainable development. — Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

The Civil Rights Movement also reaffirmed me as a singer. It taught me that singing was not entertainment, it was something else. — Bernice Johnson Reagon

I watched as people went to the memorial reading the names. I started at the first entry from 1954. I read each one quietly but out loud to myself, like I'd done with the names of those in the museum. I felt somehow they were getting the message that their sacrifice was known and their voice was heard. — Janelle Gray

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men were created equal, he owned slaves. Women couldn't vote. But, throughout history, our abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights leaders called on our nation, in reality, to live up to the nation's professed ideals in that Declaration. — Marvin Ammori

In the South, prior to the Civil Rights movement and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, democracy was the rule. The majority of people were white, and the white majority had little or no respect for any rights which the black minority had relative to property, or even to their own lives. The majority - the mob and occasionally the lynch mob - ruled. — Neal Boortz

Today's secular libertarians, who want to remove biblical religion from public life, have trouble making sense of the civil rights movement because it was so clearly a religiously inspired movement that entered the public arena and made a major difference in American life. — Bruce L. Shelley

The first thing I said to myself on 9/11 was, 'There go our civil rights.' I found out by comparing notes later that George Carlin and I both said that at the exact same time. That's the first thing that popped into our head. — Penn Jillette

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it. — Maya Angelou

It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights. — Marianne Williamson

And that brings me to one last point. I've got a simple message for all the dedicated and patriotic federal workers who have either worked without pay, or who have been forced off the job without pay for these last few weeks. Including most of my own staff. Thank you. Thanks for your service. Welcome back. What you do is important. It matters. You defend our country overseas, you deliver benefits to our troops who earned them when they come home, you guard our borders, you protect our civil rights, you help businesses grow and gain footholds in overseas markets. You protect the air we breathe, and the water our children drink, and you push the boundaries of science and space, and you guide hundreds of thousands of people each day through the glories of this country. Thank you. What you do is important, and don't let anybody else tell you different. — Barack Obama

You can't put civil rights on the ballot. — Jesse Ventura

The canard about the Civil Rights Movement is embedded within a larger deception that progressives uniformly put forward. This deception is intended to defuse the sordid history of the Democratic Party's two-century involvement in a parade of evils from slavery to segregation to lynching to forced sterilization to support for fascism to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. All these horrors are the work of the Democratic Party. — Dinesh D'Souza

When sins become civil rights, there is a temptation for Christians to keep our mouths shut and turn what is supposed to be a public faith into a private faith, but we are commanded to not be ashamed of the gospel. — Mark Driscoll

The greatest achievement of the civil-rights movement is that it has restored the dignity of indignation. — Fredric Wertham

The underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us ... — Barack Obama

In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. — Samuel Adams

Detroit was an exaggeration of what was going on across the country. You could see the divisions, even within the Civil Rights Movement of that period. At the same time that Martin Luther King was talking about his dream, Malcolm X gave his most famous address in Detroit during that same period, "The Message To The Grass Roots," dismissing the notion of integration. — David Maraniss

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university. — Russell Banks

You cannot demand your rights, civil or otherwise, if you are unwilling to say what you are. — Merle Miller

One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate. — Alice Walker

Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend Dr. Billy Graham, my work in the civil rights movement would not have been as successful as it has been. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Al Franken

In the general election, Nixon refined Goldwater's southern strategy. Unlike Goldwater, who "ran as a racist candidate," Nixon said, the 1968 GOP nominee campaigned on racial themes without explicitly mentioning race. "Law and order" replaced "states' rights." Pledging to weaken the enforcement of civil rights laws replaced outright opposition to them. Nixon "always couched his views in such a way that a citizen could avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal," said his top aide, John Ehrlichman. — Ari Berman

We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

That's what he was saying, the civil rights movement - judge me for my character, not how black my skin is, not how yellow my skin is, how short I am, how tall or fat or thin; It's by my character. — Pam Grier

Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights. — A.E. Samaan

This thing called Patriot Act, through which we abdicated a lot of our civil rights to defend the country against terrorism, it's a four-year story. — Neil Young

Non Violence and Religion:
Both designed to keep the oppressed from murdering their oppressors. — Darnell Lamont Walker

Contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty. — Ron Paul

LISTEN: If you ever wondered what you would do if you were alive in the Civil Rights Movement, NOW IS THE TIME to find out. NOW. RIGHT NOW. — Shaun King

My parents both were doing the Civil Rights Movement, were very involved with the civil rights to Congress. And my friends' parents were as well. — Janis Ian

There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement. — Shane Claiborne

We all have a stake - equally. Because if we do not save the environment and save the Earth, then whatever we do in civil rights or in a war against poverty will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction and the brotherhood of the grave. — James Farmer

Any kind of civil rights oppression is wrong. — Bryan Cranston

Son draws comics of Mongolian invasions and the Civil Rights Movement - — Adam Johnson

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. — Lynn Samuels

As a vibrant force in civil society, women continue to press for their rights, equal participation in decision-making, and the upholding of the principles of the revolution by the highest levels of leadership in Egypt. — Michelle Bachelet

The vast majority of us don't want to face the fact that we're in the middle of a sweeping social revolution. In sex. In spiritual values. In opposition to wars no one wants. In opposition to government big-brotherhood. In civil rights. In basic human goals. They're all facets of a general upheaval. — Johnny Carson

Plus I have no doubt that their garden is also where my grandparents dreamed - for a better life of equality for their grandchildren and future generations. As people rooted in their faith, they probably did a lot of praying here as well, that God would deliver us all to prosperity and peace beyond this plot of land. — Deborah L. Parker

Evil must be attacked by ... the day to day assault of the battering rams of justice. — Martin Luther King Jr.

And these great natural rights may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man's natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense. — William Blackstone

Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights. — Rebecca MacKinnon

I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years. [Said to two governors regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to then-Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan] — Lyndon B. Johnson

I do not think I was a hothead - not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life. — Pat Conroy

I'm very fond of the concept of choice as the basis for sexual preference. This point of view is unpopular in an era in which every claim for gay rights is bases on pseudoscientific sulking about how we can't help being queer; we're just born that way. Thanks, but I don't want to receive my civil rights as a charity fuck bequeathed on me by my genetic superiors. — Patrick Califia-Rice

Segregation in the American South was bankrolled by the wealthy eugenicist from the Northeast, Wickliffe Draper. — A.E. Samaan

Lovers of freedom, lovers of social justice, disarmers, peacekeepers, civil disobeyers, democrats, civil-rights activists, and defenders of the environment are legions in a single multiform cause, and they will gain strength by knowing it, taking encouragement from it, and when appropriate and opportune, pooling their efforts. — Jonathan Schell

We believe that liberty of religious faith is the first and foremost freedom in human society, is a universal value in the international community, and is also the foundation for other political and property rights. Without the universal and equitable liberty of religious faith, a multi-ethnic, multi-religion country would not be able to form a peaceful civil society, or bring about social stability, ethnic solidarity or the nation's prosperity. - THE PASTORS OF THE SHOUWANG CHURCH BEIJING, CHINA, MAY 2011 — Timothy Shah

We start 'The Butler' in June and that's incredibly exciting for me because I get to work with the amazing Forest Whitaker again. It's a phenomenal script and a great, great role - I play his son. Oprah Winfrey is his wife and my mother. My character is a radical civil rights activist. — David Oyelowo

Therefore, to you, and to the fifty governors, I have a request. Please, do not send me politicians. We do not have the time to do the things that must be done through that process. I need people who do real things in the real world. I need people who do not want to live in Washington. I need people who will not try to work the system. I need people who will come here at great personal sacrifice to do an important job, and then return home to their normal lives. I want engineers who know how things are built. I want physicians who know how to make sick people well. I want cops who know what it means when your civil rights are violated by a criminal. I want farmers who grow real food on real farms. I want people who know what it's like to have dirty hands, and pay a mortgage bill, and raise kids, and worry about the future. I want people who know they're working for you and not themselves. That's what I want. That's what I need. I think that's what a lot of you want, too. — Tom Clancy

The unsung heroes of the civil rights movement were always the wives and the mothers. — Andrew Young

My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement. My father was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker; my mother was a secretary with the Panthers. — Yaya DaCosta

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement. — Douglas Brinkley

A man with a rifle or a club can only be stopped by a person who defends himself with a rifle or a club. That's equality. If the United States government doesn't want you and me to have rifles, then take the rifles away from those racists.
If they don't want you and me to use clubs, take the clubs away from the racists. If they don't want you and me to get violent, then stop the racists from being violent. Don't teach us non-violence!!! — Malcolm X

There was no miracle that night ... — Ed King