And there’s also a culture that goes along with it – a culture of solidarity and sympathy and mutual aid and support ... Here as elsewhere unions have been a leading force, probably the leading force, for democracy and human rights. Noam Chomsky, lecture 1988, ‘Class War: The Attack on Working People’
Labor movements have regularly been in the forefront of popular struggles for basic rights including labour rights and democracy. Noam Chomsky, Rickman Godlee lecture 2011, ‘Contours of Global Order’, Youtube 1.39.23
Fundamental violations of human rights always lead to people feeling less and less human. Aung San Suu Kyi
I believe in an America where the rights that I have described are enjoyed by all, regardless of their race or their creed or their national origin – where every citizen is free to think and speak as he pleases and write and worship as he pleases – and where every citizen is free to vote as he pleases, without instructions from anyone, his employer, the union leader or his clergyman. John F Kennedy, speech Convention Centre Philadelphia October 1960
The protection of our rights can endure no longer than the performance of our responsibilities. Each can be neglected only at the peril of the other. I speak to you today, therefore, not of your rights as Americans, but of your responsibilities. They are many in number and different in nature. They do not rest with equal weight upon the shoulders of all. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of responsibility. All Americans must be responsible citizens, but some must be more responsible than others, by virtue of their public or their private position, their role in the family or community, their prospects for the future, or their legacy from the past. Increased responsibility goes with increased ability, for of those to whom much is given, much is required. John F Kennedy, May 1963
This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal. And that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. My fellow Americans, this is a problem which faces us all. In every city of the north as well as the south. Today there are Negroes unemployed two or three times as many compared to whites. Inadequate education, moving into the large cities, unable to find work, denied equal rights; we cannot say to 10% of the population you can’t have that right ... We owe them, and we owe ourselves, a better country than that. John F Kennedy, 19th June 1963
The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities. ibid.
Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory. F D Roosevelt
In our day certain economic fruits have become accepted as self-evident. A second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station or race or creed. Among these are the right to a useful and remunerated job. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation. F D Roosevelt, televised annex to State of the Union address
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
That’s the same argument put forward by the Indonesian dictator General Suharto, whose regime is responsible for the deaths of 200,000 people in East Timor. General Suharto has given large amounts of money to the ANC, and President Mandela has given him South Africa’s highest honour. John Pilger, Apartheid Did Not Die
We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly. John Pilger
While Europe's eye is fix’d on mighty things,
The fate of empires and the fall of kings;
While quacks of State must each produce his plan,
And even children lisp the Rights of Man;
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,
The Rights of Women merit some attention. Robert Burns
Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something you had a right to. George Orwell
You can’t have occupation and human rights. Christopher Hitchens
Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights – the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Christopher Hitchens
I believe we should try to move away from the vocabulary and attitudes which shape the stereotyping of developed and developing country approaches to human rights issues. We are collective custodians of universal human rights standards, and any sense that we fall into camps of ‘accuser’ and ‘accused’ is absolutely corrosive of our joint purposes. The reality is that no group of countries has any grounds for complacency about its own human rights performance and no group of countries does itself justice by automatically slipping into the ‘victim’ mode. Mary Robinson
Your life brings you into a multiplicity of relationships with other people. Some of them love justice and righteousness; others do not seem to want to practice them – they do you a wrong. Your soul is not hardened to the suffering they inflict upon you in this way, but you search and examine yourself; you convince yourself that you are in the right, and you rest call and strong in this conviction. However much they outrage me they still will not be able to deprive me of this peace – that I know I am in the right and that I suffer wrong. In this view there is a satisfaction, a joy, that presumably every one of us has tasted, and when you continue to suffer wrong, you are built up by the thought that you are in the right. This point of view is so natural, so understandable, so frequently tested in life, and yet it is not with this that we want to calm doubt and to heal care but by deliberating upon the upbuilding that lies in the thought that we are always in the wrong. Can the opposite point of view have the same effect? Soren Kierkegaard
The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms, and false reasonings, is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator, to the whole human race; and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society. Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 1775
The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world order. Yet, I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world. Vaclav Havel
There was a lot of camaraderie ... There was a drive forward to have better working conditions, better working rights for the individual. They have done a lot of good for a lot of people. Richard Griffiths, televised interview The British at Work: Them and US 1964-1980, BBC 2011
For two decades the state has been taking liberties, and these liberties were once ours. E P Thompson
When all your right become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours ... then surely it is a braver, a saner and truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men. Robert Casement, statement at Old Bailey trial
Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth, a thing no more to be doled out to us, or withheld from us, by another people than the right to life itself – than the right to feel the sun, or smell the flowers, or to love our kind. Robert Casement, Irish nationalist, executed for treason 1916
Today Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by their world government. Henry Kissinger
There was an immediate assumption on the part of the administration that there had to be a surrender of certain of our rights. John Conyers, Congress Michigan