Throughout my years championing for civil rights, analyzing politics and advocating on behalf of the voiceless, I am disturbed the most when harmless children suffer because of politics or detrimental policies.
My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.
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.
But a multitude of people, even the two hundred million of the Chinese empire, cannot subsist without civil government.
But 18 years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, there still remains unfinished work to completely rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our Nation’s history.
The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it’s Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women’s rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.
Similarly, gender-equality, supremacy of law, political participation, civil society, and transparency are among the indispensable elements that are the imperatives of democratization.
If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There’s Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It’s pretty eclectic.
Civil rights happened because youth got involved. The youth stood up and helped to break the pattern that their parents had got accustomed to living. The next generation has to take that stand for whatever it is, socially, that they are involved in.
When you scan the globe’s hot spots, every civil war and massacre, every act of terror and every clash between states has its unique local circumstances.
It is this desire to see civil society remain a strong and united force within the U.K. that has encouraged me to chair Citizens U.K. Commission on Islam, Participation and Public Life.
For the gay establishment, the death of right and wrong began when gaining civil rights ceased to be enough.
When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the modern Southern GOP was born.
If surveillance infiltrates our homes and personal relationships, that is a gross breach of our human and civil rights.
Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don’t see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that.
Well, my personal mission statement is that we want marriage equality in all 50 states. We want it not to be a state-by-state issue. We don’t want it to be something the majority is voting on. I don’t think the civil rights of any minority should be in the hands of any majority.
We show deference to the civil authorities when they respect the divine origin of their power and when they serve the people with objective reference to the law of God.
From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
I see education in the U.K. as a civil rights struggle.
I’m immensely proud to be a Democrat because of our party’s history of fighting for justice, fairness, and equality. From Roosevelt to Obama, we’ve worked to bring seniors and children out of poverty, expanded civil rights, supported science and research, and pushed for equality of opportunity.
We’re talking about in the Proposition 8 case fundamental rights, civil rights. I offer no apology for the position I took in Prop. 8.
Arresting opposition leaders and restricting civil society will not stop people from protesting, but it can create leaderless movements that leave no one with whom the government can mediate a peaceful way forward.
I like Mitt Romney as a person. I think he’s a dignified person. But I have no common ground on economics. He doesn’t worry about the Federal Reserve. He doesn’t worry about foreign policy. He doesn’t talk about civil liberties, so I would have a hard time to expect him to ever invite me to campaign with him.
I believe in civil rights. Every man is born equal and should be treated as human.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope – that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.
Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.
If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country, because he refuses to leave the back of the bus.
Our second remark is, that the office is of divine appointment, not merely in the sense in which the civil powers are ordained of God, but in the sense that ministers derive their authority from Christ, and not from the people.
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.
Since before the Civil War, crosses have indeed garnished veterans’ memorials from the North to the South, from Arlington to Normandy, and from the South Pacific to the Middle East.
When Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio cracked down on illegal immigration without getting permission from Obama, they threatened to revoke his 287(g) status. When Sheriff Joe refused to balk, they filed suit against him with a frivolous civil rights claim.
After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.
The right to vote is one of our nation’s most important civil rights.
In the view of some people, you can only believe in civil rights if you work as a civil rights lawyer. I just don’t buy that.
I think even a hero is someone who has sort of the flaw or imperfection of character. I remember Alice Walker saying that once – she’d written a novel about a civil rights hero, and it was someone who had this flaw, this central flaw.
During the 1980s, international interest in the Nicaraguan war was intense. No conflict since the Spanish civil war had provoked such passion around the world. It was a classic good-versus-evil war.
My dad was a civil servant, and my mum was a secretary.
There is a need to accept a limited disruption of civil liberties in order to penetrate terror.
The Civil War always moves me.
Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the ownership of land.
The Civil Service is a vital economic asset to the UK – firstly, in the way it creates a framework for excellence in service delivery and secondly, in how it helps organise the best way to deliver modern public services on which both businesses and individuals depend.
The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it’s pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.
When I arrived in America, I experienced serious culture shock. For someone with a religious upbringing, the 1960s were an extremely difficult time. Even though religion was a big part of the civil rights and peace movements, in my college religion was treated as irrelevant, hopelessly stodgy, and behind the times.
It’s been vindicating to see the reaction from lawmakers, judges, public bodies around the world, civil liberties activists who have said it’s true that we have a right to at least know the broad outlines of what our government’s doing in our name and what it’s doing against us.
Where there is an absence of international political leadership, civil society should step in to fill the gap, providing the energy and vision needed to move the world in a new and better direction.
I rise today in support of Bill C-38, the Civil Marriage Act. I rise in support of a Canada in which liberties are safeguarded, rights are protected and the people of this land are treated as equals under the law.
In order to have greater visibility of the larger cyber threat landscape, we must remove the government bureaucratic stovepipes that inhibit our abilities to effectively defend America while ensuring citizens’ privacy and civil liberties are also protected.
As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.
As American freemen, we cannot but sympathize in all efforts to extend the blessings of civil and political liberty, but at the same time, we are warned by the admonitions of history and the voice of our own beloved Washington to abstain from entangling alliances with foreign nations.
We cannot imagine democracies without a vibrant civil society.
What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.
