Montesquieu Quotes

I'd always been treated like an object, not like a human.

To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of huger and deprivation is to dehumanize them. But such has been the terrible fate of all black persons in our country under the system of apartheid.

The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.

You can't help but feel all the human-rights issues.

Why is Slavery so much condemn'd and strove against in one Case, and so highly applauded and held so necessary and so sacred in another?

The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others. Neither can we permit states' rights at the expense of human rights.

We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings and consequently, some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves.

Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.

If you care about injustice, and if you care about freedom, and you care about human rights, then you care about them everywhere.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

We of Africa protest that, in this day and age, we should continue to be treated as lesser human beings than other races.

From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.

For most of the world, civil and political rights... come as luxuries that are far away in the future.

So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.

Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

There is no such thing as white superiority or black inferiority…all people are equal before God…there may not be under any circumstances a political policy based on oppression, discrimination and exploitation…the task of the Church is to protest against unjust laws.

Excessive economic and social disparity between individuals and peoples of the one human race is a source of scandal and militates against social justice, equity, human dignity, as well as social and international peace.

Whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed.

Slaves no doubt, but still men.

I've been in revolt for years against ignominy, against injustice, against inequality, against immorality, against the exploitation of human beings.

When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that's a violation of basic human rights.

I think that the dehumanization of another person can happen in the matter of an instant.

To support policies that dehumanise others is to dehumanise yourself.

Poverty is rooted in injustice.