Quotes
Use these human rights-related quotes and sayings in your campaigning. You can use them in a newsletter, on a poster or on stickers. They're inspirational, help get your point across, and get people thinking. Use your imagination! Be inspired!
Do you have a quote to add to our list? E-mail youth@amnesty.ca
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-Edmund Burke
No matter how strong the wind of evil may blow, the flame of truth cannot be extinguished.
-His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso
The old law of an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
-Martin Luther King
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
-Martin Luther King
Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder.
-Coretta Scott King
In Germany they first came for the Communists; I did not speak because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews; I did not speak because I was not a Jew. Then they came to fetch the workers, members of trade unions; I was not a trade unionist. Afterward, they came for the Catholics; I did not say anything because I was a Protestant. Eventually they came for me, and there was no one left to speak.
-Pastor Martin Niemoller, a Protestant minister imprisoned during Germany's Third Reich
It can be fun to write to people who lead authoritarian or repressive regimes, have a dictator as a pen-pal, and be a complete nuisance to him by sending him these letters.
- Sting
"Non-violence is a more active and real fight against wickedness than retaliation whose very nature is to increase wickedness. It is not a weapon of the weak. It is a weapon of the strongest and bravest."
- Mahatma Gandhi
Silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor.
-Ginetta Sagan
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968
Be the change you want to see in the world.
- Mahatma Gandhi
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness."
- Chinese Proverb
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Life is life, fight for it.
- Mother Teresa
"There are only two ways of spreading light - to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
- Edith Wharton, American Novelist
We all shine with our own small light; together we blaze like the sun.
A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all direction. Each one of our thoughts, words, and deeds is like that. We won't sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
- Dorothy Day
Never doubt that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead
We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
- Henry Ford
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
- Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.
It's time for greatness -- not for greed. It's a time for idealism -- not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.
- Marian Wright Edelman