Inspirational human rights quotes will brighten up your day and make you feel ready to take on anything.

Famous Human Rights Quotes

Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities. – Pope Francis

We declare that human rights are for all of us, all the time: whoever we are and wherever we are from; no matter our class, our opinions, our sexual orientation. – Ban Ki-moon

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. – Nelson Mandela

Joy is found when you focus your energy on improving human dignity, human capacity and human values. – Amit Ray

Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity. – Imelda Marcos

No human being should be maltreated under any circumstances. We are all wonderful creation of God. May we affectionately love one another. – Lailah Gifty Akita

Some values must be universal, like human rights and the equal worth of every human being. – Bjorn Ulvaeus

Liberty must be engraved in our heart and practiced every minute to the letter and spirit. – Abhijit Naskar

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood. – Jimmy Carter

A right delayed is a right denied. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. – John F. Kennedy

You’re not under attack when others gain rights and privileges you’ve always had. – DaShanne Stokes

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave. – Frederick Douglass

Our hopes for a more just, safe, and peaceful world can only be achieved when there is universal respect for the inherent dignity and equal rights of all members of the human family. – Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

Because to take away a man’s freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person. – Madeleine L’Engle

My dreams for the future are simple: work, a happy, healthy family, a lovely long motorcycle ride, and continuing the struggle to awaken people to the need for serious human rights reform. – Mike Farrell

Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must at that moment become the center of the universe. – Elie Wiesel

Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. – Martin Luther King Jr.

It means a great deal to those who are oppressed to know that they are not alone. Never let anyone tell you that what you are doing is insignificant. – Desmond Tutu

The connection between women’s human rights, gender equality, socioeconomic development and peace is increasingly apparent. – Mahnaz Afkhami

The day we become silent about the things that matter is the moment our lives begin to end."- Shenita Etwaroo

In the future, human rights will be increasingly a universal criterion for designing ethical systems. – Mahnaz Afkhami

The right to development is the measure of the respect of all other human rights.That should be our aim: a situation in which all individuals are enabled to maximize their potential, and to contribute to the evolution of society as a whole. – Kofi Annan

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. – Elie Wiesel

Those who today still feel a sense of impotence can do something: they can support Amnesty International. They can help it to stand up for freedom and justice. – Peter Benenson

No voting on who gets to be people. – N. K. Jemisin

A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you. – Ramsey Clark

A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you. – Ramsey Clark

Human rights education is much more than a lesson in schools or a theme for a day; it is a process to equip people with the tools they need to live lives of security and dignity. – Kofi Annan

The evolution of the human rights movement clearly illustrates humanity’s ongoing struggle toward creating a better world. – Robert Alan Silverstein

Silence never won rights. They are not handed down from above; they are forced by pressures from below. – Roger Nash Baldwin

Everyone has a right to peaceful coexistence, the basic personal freedoms, the alleviation of suffering, and the opportunity to lead a productive life… – Jimmy Carter

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. – Abigail Adams

Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. – James Baldwin

What we want to see is the development of human rights and greater democracy, not just because it is our system but because we think that’s the best way that economic and political development go hand in hand. – Tony Blair

The right to development is the measure of the respect of all other human rights. That should be our aim: a situation in which all individuals are enabled to maximize their potential, and to contribute to the evolution of society as a whole. – Boutros Boutros-Ghali

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings. – Pearl S. Buck

You are a human being. You have rights inherent in that reality. You have dignity and worth that exists prior to law. – Lyn Beth Neylon

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. – Abraham Lincoln

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself. – Robert Ingersoll

To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fails to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled — because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance. – Friedrich Nietzsche

The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled underfoot. – William Ellery Channing

A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered. – Felix Adler

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. – Noam Chomsky

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood. – Jimmy Carter

And we who have toiled for freedom’s law, have we sought for freedom’s soul? Have we learned at last that human right is not a part but the whole? – John Boyle O’Reilly

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights. – Bishop Desmond Tutu

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. – Horace Greeley

No man is above the law and no man below it. – Theodore Roosevelt

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit. – Victor Hugo

The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. – Emma Goldman

In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself. – Oscar Wilde

Freedom from fear could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights – Dag Hammarskjold