civil-rights

[We're] going to change the world. One day they'll write about us. You'll see.

Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people who have no intelligent knowledge of what they condemn?

Gospel music is nothing but singing of good tidings -- spreading the good news. It will last as long as any music because it is sung straight from the human heart.

Get off of my shoulders. The foundation has been laid, now its time for you to build on it and get to work.

Make noise for justice.Make noise for inclusion.Make noise for empathy.Make noise for our planet.Make noise for civil rights.Make noise for women__ rights.Make noise for compassion.Make noise for LOVE.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most sweeping civil rights legislation of its day, and included women's rights as part of its reforms. Ironically, the section on women's rights was added by a senator from Virginia who opposed the whole thing and was said to be sure that if he stuck something about womens' rights into it, it would never pass. The bill passed anyway, though, much to the chagrin of a certain wiener from Virginia.

I didn`t change. The Democratic Party slid to the Left from right under me.

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.

I am not interested in having freedom from burdens. I don't need any authority to free me from responsibility.I am not interested in having freedoms within an authoritarian's parameters. I am only interested in self-determination.I have only respect for liberty as I am a libertarian.

Few people understood the exceptional role the civil rights movement had on the white boys and girls of the South. Bill Clinton would never have become who he was without the shining example of Martin Luther King. The same is true of Jimmy Carter and Fritz Hollings and Richard and Joe Riley. Imagine this: you__e a little white kid and you watch firehoses turned on people who don__ seem to be hurting anyone, and fierce dogs being tuned on young men who carry signs about freedom. We white kids grew up watching movies and TV and guess what we had learned to do? We had learned to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga- a belief that we're all connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me- even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer- even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief- I am my brother__ keeper, I am my sister__ keeper- that makes this country work.

It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others.

The freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.

You have to remember, rights don't come in groups we shouldn't have 'gay rights'; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn't have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understan

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, __et America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,_ he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, __merica never was America to me,_ and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.