Gabrielle Giffords Quotes

Where there are breaches of human rights, you need to speak out about it, no matter where it is.

Racism is a form of hate. We pass it on to our young people. When we do that, we are robbing children of their innocence.

Children teach us to be courageous and to stand up against injustice.

I hope to leave my children a sense of empathy and pity and a will to right social wrongs

But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a moldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

It's a difficult position. Do you endanger your child to fight for the right thing, or do you keep your mouth shut and let your child grow up in a world where their natural rights are stripped away from them?

Help and you will abolish apathy-the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil.

A man who knows a thing, who is aware of a given danger, and sees the possibility of a remedy with his own eyes, has the duty and obligation, by God, not to work 'silently,' but to stand up before the whole public against the evil and for its cure.

Suppose that I see a hungry child in the street, and I am able to offer the child some food. Am I morally culpable if I refuse to do so? Am I morally culpable if I choose not to do what I easily can about the fact that 1000 children die every hour from easily preventable disease, according to UNICEF? Or the fact that the government of my own "free and open society" is engaged in monstrous crimes that can easily be mitigated or terminated? Is it even possible to debate these questions?

When I visited Auschwitz I was horrified. And when I visited Iraq, I thought to myself, 'What will we tell our children in fifty years when they ask what we did when the people in Iraq were dying.'

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those 'good Germans' who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.

Faith in public life does not mean that God tells you to bomb another country or to go get Saddam Hussein. Faith in public life means that every child, regardless of their religious belief, should have health care and be able to go to school. Because my faith saying I can bomb Iraq is the same as your faith saying you can take over a passenger plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.

If I had a child who wanted to be a teacher, I would bid him Godspeed as if he were going to war. For indeed the war against prejudice, greed, and ignorance is eternal, and those who dedicate themselves to it give their lives no less because they may live to see some fraction of the battle won.

It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.

It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined.

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?

A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.

We cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realising, on the man's part, the danger of telling lies to children. A single untruth on the part of the master will destroy the results of his education.

However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

Someone must not be afraid to say, 'moral perversion is wrong.' If we do not act now, homosexuals will 'own' America! If you and I do not speak up now, this homosexual steamroller will literally crush all decent men, women, and children who get in its way ... and our nation will pay a terrible price!

Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows. Its women weep for their fallen and they lament for the future of the children of the race. It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.

Even if, personally, I'm in a place of contentment or solidity, I feel like it's hard not to look out into American culture and see vast inequity, widespread institutionalized violence and racism and transphobia and environmental destruction. It's hard to be in this world and feel a sense of innate satisfaction at all. There's plenty of things to feel unsettled about.

To those of you who would classify yourselves as conservatives I would say, meditate long and hard on Jesus' saying "Whatever you do to the least of these you have done to me".

Poverty is caused by sin and disobeying the word of god.