Jennifer Chiaverini Quotes

Where I come from, if you see your family and friends' civil rights being taken away, you speak up and do everything you can to keep that from happening!

We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

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?”

Justice, particularly for the oppressed and marginalized in our society, never comes without great effort and sacrifice.

I know we have to have people of good conscience who stand up against oppression. I know we have to have people who understand that social justice belongs to us all. And that wakes me up every morning, and that makes me fight even harder.

Freedom must be demanded and defended, by those who have been denied it and by those who are already free.

I have a big passion about civil rights for everyone - whoever is being downtrodden at the moment, it doesn't matter: racial discrimination or sexual orientation or gender. Whatever it is, I'm there. I think I was a born civil rights activist. I can't stand the smashing of a community. It's not fair and it's not right.

Speaking out is important for me because everyone should be treated equally.

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don't believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.

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

The rights of all of us are diminished when the rights of any one of us are threatened.

Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted.

Liberty without equality is a name of noble sound and squalid result.

I cannot sit by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil.

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.

World leaders and, particularly, Muslim religious leaders need to stand up and protect the oppressed.

We are living in tumultuous times, and our focus should be fighting against the oppression and injustices that are against us - not battling those who are on the same side of seeking justice and peace.

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

It's always important, when we experience injustice in this nation, that people in power understand that we will not take that injustice quietly.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.

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

Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.

The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic but to end the injustice.