Conor Oberst Quotes

Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion over other religions, or a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others. However, today, as in the past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws. We now see “religious liberty” arguments sneaking their way back into our political and constitutional discourse (just like the concept of “state rights”) in an effort to undermine the rights of some Americans.

When a government forcibly holds enough people indefinitely without trial, it evokes the kinds of raids, detention, and abuses of power associated with authoritarian states - or darker periods in American history.

Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence.

... a lynching of the Constitution.

We [the FBI] are a fact-gathering organization only. We don't clear anybody. We don't condemn anybody..... The minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

… courts today are less inclined to allow majoritarian coercion of unpopular or disliked minority groups, especially when blatant racism . . . religious prejudice, or some other constitutionally suspect motivation, can be discovered behind such legislation

Get those goddamned niggers! And get those goddamned white niggers.

Who is a terrorist? Is it not the person who has been persecuting human beings simply because they are black?

Our nation has slashed budgets for education, job training, economic development, and drug treatment while investing billions in prisons and militarized police. A penal system unprecedented in world history has been born. Millions have been arrested and stripped of basic civil and human rights.

Stop and frisk - whether done while walking down the street or while driving a car - is a civil rights violation.

Racism kills people. It kills people!

The tactics that the Trump administration are using on the streets of Portland are abhorrent. People are being literally scooped off the street into unmarked vans, rental cars, apparently. They are being denied probable cause. And they are denied due process. They don't even know who's pulling them into the vans.

Policing has never been about public safety: its origins are rooted in social control, the denial of people's human rights, securing the U.S. borders, recapturing escaped, enslaved Africans, and upholding racist, homophobic, and transphobic laws.

We're a country that allowed waterboarding and indefinite detention, and we're a country where the NYPD Intelligence Division has police files on what Muslims think of the State of the Union address.

I've had my fair share of incidents with law enforcement, whether they're saying smart remarks, condescending remarks to downplay who I am and what I can afford... It's something that made me stronger on the back end of it, and learned from those instances.

When a black church is hit in South Carolina by someone with hate in their spirit, that's something that touches all of America, but as a person of color, I see that story even through a deeper prism of, 'Gosh, that takes us back to a time when black churches were targets in this country.'

I've never seen somebody get more flak than Colin Kaepernick for silently and nonviolently protesting and standing up for something he believes, and something that obviously is an actual problem.

Civil rights cases are hard to win.

Racism is a human problem and a crime that is absolutely so ghastly that a person who is fighting racism is well within his rights to fight against it by any means necessary until it is eliminated.

Especially as a teenager, I was always being racially profiled by the police. You just see all this injustice, and you want to do something about it, but you don't know how.

The ugliness of bigotry stands in direct contradiction to the very meaning of America.

Racism was never acceptable to the people who suffer from it.

We have less civil liberties than we had on 9/ 1 1 in some significant ways. But we are also, I believe, less safe as a result in many instances of the sacrifice in human rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law that (the Bush) administration has adopted.

This is a time when the protections of Americans' liberties are directly at risk, as are the checks and balances that have served to constrain abuses of power for more than 200 years. The Supreme Court is relied upon by all of to us protect our fundamental rights.