Violation of Human Rights Quotes

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

The Bolshevik Smidovich gave a written promise to spare the lives of those Junkers who surrendered, and then allowed the prisoners to be beaten to death one by one. … General Dukhonin surrendered to Krylenko, who in turn offered Dukhonin no protection as he was torn limb from limb before his very eyes. The murderers remained unpunished.

World peace is threatened not only by weapons of mass destruction but also by conventional weapons which have led to countless violations of human rights, including the rights to life and to physical integrity. A strong treaty can contribute greatly to international and regional peace, security and stability.

… an obnoxious jerk and war criminal

What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than eighty years. It’s sons are being killed, its blood is being shed, its holy places are being attacked, and it is not being ruled according to what God has decreed.

Violence against women continues to persist as one of the most heinous, systematic and prevalent human rights abuses in the world. It is a threat to all women, and an obstacle to all our efforts for development, peace, and gender equality in all societies. Violence against women is always a violation of human rights; it is always a crime; and it is always unacceptable. Let us take this issue with the deadly seriousness that it deserves.

Slavery is the ultimate and greatest evil. For it is based on a denial of the dignity of the human soul.

They [the Mormons] have plundered or robbed and burned every house in Gallatin, our county seat, among the rest our Post Office, have driven almost every individual from the county, who are now flying before them with their families, many of whom have been forced out without necessary clothing, their wives and little children wading in many instances through the snow without a shoe. When the miserable families are then forced out, their houses are plundered and then burned. They are making this universal throughout the county. They have burned for me two houses and, sir, think this not exaggeration, for all is not told. And for the truth of all and every statement here made, I pledge the honor of an officer & gentleman.

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.

Daily Herald this morning described burning Berlin on Saturday night as having looked “like an oven”. I wonder who really gets the satisfaction out of this terrible deterioration in human values.

Extensive violations of human rights (torture, forced reduction of living standards for much of the population, police-sponsored death squads, destruction of representative institutions or of independent unions, etc.) are directly correlated with US government support. The linkage is not accidental; rather it is systematic. The reason is obvious enough. Client fascism often improves the business climate for American corporations, quite generally the guiding factor in foreign policy.

Unfortunately, the United States and a few other governments have used the war on terrorism as a way of violating human rights. I am referring to the case of the Guantánamo Bay prisoners. This violation of the rights of prisoners has been so unbelievable that the United Nations has reminded the United States repeatedly that the treatment of prisoners should take place according to the preestablished conventions of the United Nations.

Torture doesn't work.

The slightest sign of stability is used by local authoritarian leaders to bargain for the sympathies of Western countries that are, for the sake of a balanced relationship, bound to turn a blind eye to obvious, blatant violations of human rights and the deconstruction of democratic institutions in these countries.

Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

The exploitation of women, mass hunger, disregard for freedom of conscience and for freedom of speech, widespread and racial discrimination all these evils are far too prevalent to be overlooked.

Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.

There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule, executions without trial or with a mock trial for political offenses, the nationalization or expropriation of private property, and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.

What was once justified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable violation of human rights.

When governments go too far to punish people for actions that are dissent rather than a real threat to the nation, they risk delegitimizing not just their systems of justice, but the legitimacy of the government itself. Because when they bring political charges against people for acts that were clearly at least intended to work in the public interest, they deny them the opportunity to mount a public-interest defense.

The State lives by its very existence on the two-fold and pervasive employment of aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed to be defending.

Freedom is the basic concept and construct of life everywhere, because freedom is the basic nature of God. All systems which reduce, restrict, impinge upon or eliminate freedom in any way are systems which work against life itself.

Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.

Every murder or other injury, no matter for what cause, committed or inflicted on another is a crime against humanity.