Emily Thornberry Quotes

Civil rights and women's rights and gay rights all take time in this country.

People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We're clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven't reached true democracy yet.

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.

Desegregation is a joke.

I thought that we would wake up this morning and have the same rights as our husbands, grandsons and garbage men—but we are still begging to be let into our country's Constitution.

There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.

We seek the right to play our part in advancing the cause of national defense and national unity. But certainly, there can be no true national unity where one-tenth of the population is denied their basic rights as American citizens.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees women across this country, including my daughters, the right to choose for themselves when and how to start their families. Yet, more than forty years after Roe v. Wade, women's reproductive rights remain in jeopardy.

Americans are guaranteed the constitutional right to legal abortion in Roe v. Wade, and it's past time for Republicans to stop using the issue as a political football. In fact, it's past time for Republican politicians to stop interfering in women's personal lives, period.

I believe that all men and women are created equal, but it took our country until 1920 to acknowledge this for women. And then it took until 1964, the year before I was born, to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. And same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015.

I want more people to speak up about issues, like equal pay.

The fact that's why the prisons and stock in private prisons rose the very day after the election results [for Donald Trump] were announced. The fact that progress that was made for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ people, are all at risk.

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too.

While women may look different, as some wear suits and others wear saris, or some cover their hair while others wear their hair loose, women need to stand together because they all face the central point of discrimination, although the extremity of which may be different from Kigali to Kabul.

Whether you're president or speaker, if you're wrong, we need to stand up and point it out. That's what Martin Luther King had talked about: being judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. So some of us pounded away on some of the ridiculous policies of Pelosi - and lo and behold, over time, the public began to see.

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

Too often, advances in civil rights or women's rights are undermined by wrong-headed legislation or weak-kneed political leadership.

Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

The world is still sexist.

In the women's movement, women needed men to stand up and say, 'This isn't right.' In the civil rights of the '60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights.

Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white - you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.

It's been a long struggle. But we've made huge progress. I mean, when I started at Berkeley, women weren't allowed to be part of the band. No women were allowed into the male faculty club. I mean, I was there. I remember that! The worlds were so divided. So the change has been huge.

Indeed, an entire generation of Americans has grown to adulthood since the Roe decision of 1973, which held that the right to choose an abortion was a privacy right protected by our Constitution.

There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.