Ayman Odeh Quotes

Israeli Arabs are equal citizens.

Democracy doesn't automatically safeguard women and minorities.

Israeli Arabs have more political rights than any other Arabs in the Middle East, including their compatriots in the Palestinian Authority.

No one ceases to be a man, no one forfeits his rights to civilization merely by being more or less uncultured, and since the Filipino is regarded as a fit citizen when he is asked to pay taxes or shed his blood to defend the fatherland, why must this fitness be denied him when the question arises of granting him some right?

For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.

America is a dirty rag if it will not protect all of its citizens.

I'm very proud to be the prime minister of all of Israel's citizens, Arabs and Jews alike.

Quite frankly, I think political correctness is the worst form of censorship. You're not allowed to speak your mind unless you're black, or unless you're a terrorist, or unless you're an Arab or a minority people. Then you can say what you like. But if you are like a lot of us you are not supposed to say certain things.

There's no such thing as second class citizenship. That's like telling me you can be a little bit pregnant.

Who needs the protection of the Bill of Rights most? The weak, the most vulnerable in society.

In today's Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities' constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming.

Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.

There is this huge Roma problem in Europe. There are a lot of Romas who are discriminated against in countries like the Czech Republic or Hungary. They are an ethnic minority that in Europe everyone loves to hate.

When you're fighting for economic and social justice, you're always fighting for the minority.

The Kurdish people have the right of self-determination like every other nation in the world.

I think the biggest problem of the 21st century is how to deal with minorities.

We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

We are a nation of minorities. In a nation of minorities, you can’t cherry-pick rights.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

Minorities should be free from any kind of insecurity.

Look not to the size of cathedrals or even to the words on the statute books for proof of the reality of religious freedom. Ask what is the fate of the Protestant in Spain, the Jew in Saudi Arabia, the Arab in Israel, the Catholic in Poland or the atheist in the United States?

A Volk [people] without a state is nothing, a lifelong frivolous phantom like the vagabond gypsies and Jews.

The struggle for human rights and democracy are not always the same thing. Sometimes what you have to do is break cultural attitudes. Democracies aren’t necessarily very good at that…. It’s very hard for oppressed minorities to be given their due.

It's always going to be a fight for anyone who isn't an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn't have a fight.

For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world - for whites, anyway.