Franz Grillparzer Quotes

This is not a question of expediency, but of right. In antebellum days the proposition was not, “Are the blacks good enough to be free?” but, “Have they the right?” So today the question is not, “Will outrages result from freeing humanity?” but, “Has it the right to life, the means of life, the opportunities of happiness?”

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

Let us not forget such words, and all they mean, as hatred, bitterness, and rancor greed, intolerance, bigotry; let us renew our faith and pledge to man, his right to be himself and free.

All my life I have fought against prejudice and intolerance.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Emancipation - what is meant by it? Simply that the slaves shall cease to be held as property and shall henceforth be held and treated as human beings. Simply, that we should take our feet from off their necks.

For as long as I can remember, I've always been interested in issues of social justice, political freedom, and civil rights.

All I want to be is human and American and have all the same rights and I will shut up.

Until we are all free, we are none of us free.

When you discriminate against anyone, you discriminate against everyone. It's a display of terrible intolerance.

We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights.

The last time I checked, the only difference between my gay friends and I is who we choose to love. I'm not sure how that warrants a loss of rights, but it needs to stop. What ever happened to liberty and justice for all?

We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.

The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

People took some part of us and used it to discriminate against us. In our case, it was our ethnicity; it's precisely the same thing for sexual orientation.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

Gay people exist. There's nothing we can do in public policy that makes more of us exist, or less of us exist. And you guys have been arguing for a generation that public policy ought to essentially demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval of the fact that we exist, but you don't make any less of us exist. You just are arguing in favor of more discrimination, and more discrimination doesn't make straight people's lives any better.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

Freeing people from oppression and despair is eternally right.

It's outrageous to me when I see people hate on someone because of their sexuality. I hate the intolerance. I hate the judgment. I hate it so much.

True religion is a revolutionary force: it is an inveterate enemy of oppression, privilege, and injustice.

I believe in, and will to the best of my ability fight for, equal rights and freedom of opinion for everyone, regardless of colour, religion, nationality, orientation - you know the rest.

I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion.