Barbara Jordan Quotes

The issue of human rights is one of the most fundamental human issues and also one of the most sensitive and controversial.

Does the imam have a legal right to build the mosque at Ground Zero? The answer is yes. But is it the right thing to do? The answer is no. And most Americans, and most moderate Muslims, join with me in that call.

Winning the presidency, for me, is not worth the price of silence on the issue of human [civil] rights.

The illegal immigrants may have broken the law, but we have been complicit.

My parents being from Nigeria deeply informs all my social justice and human rights work.

Lifestyle and livelihood are pivotal moral issues.

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

Legalizing abortion to get government out of the bedroom is like legalizing cannibalism to get government out of the kitchen.

Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to the government, but our futures.

If slavery be a sin, it is not yours. It does not rest on your action for its origin, on your consent for its existence. It is a common law right to property in the service of man; its origin was Divine decree.

This is why moral uneasiness is destined to become even more acute. It is obvious that a fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery is at the root of contemporary economics and materialistic civilization, which does not allow the human family to break free from such radically unjust situations.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue... whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.

They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

When people in a country are being hurt, the issues are bigger than sport. Let's hope the right decision is made

The law is a powerful thing but the law doesn't always change what's in people's hearts. And so all of us have an obligation to think about how we're treating other people.

We value some lives more than others.

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment.

Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.

The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist's job to find the ways in which these laws can serve the human will. However, it is not the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives.

Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it . . .

I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life. I just think if we could take all the obsession with the personal (inaudible), and personal judgment and have people be concerned about the environment, what a different world we would live in.

We're living in a time where we all got to stay woke !