#rights

Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man? ↗

— Howard Zinn

#equality #faith #government #history #equality

Still it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated socially responsible family-centered taxpaying Little League-coaching nation-serving respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic ne'er-do-well heterosexual deadbeats like me ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#gay-marriage #gay-rights #homosexual #humor #marriage

If you are not vegan, please consider going vegan. It’s a matter of nonviolence. Being vegan is your statement that you reject violence to other sentient beings, to yourself, and to the environment, on which all sentient beings depend. ↗

— Gary L. Francione

#abolitionist #ahimsa #animals #education #exploitation

In the preface of "The Rifles" "Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing." Barnabas Piryuaq "Well, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created." Jan Welzi 1933. ↗

— William T. Vollmann

#environment #hunters #native-americans #slaughter #violence

We generally accept that it's natural for carnivorous wild animals to kill other animals in order to live. But people don't often think (or even know) about the extraordinary and unnatural suffering that humans inflict on the animals that we freely harvest for food, with the help of modern high technology and the animal food sciences. ↗

— Marc Bekoff

#food #speciesism #vegan #food

That's what the Senate is about. It's the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust. ↗

— Robert Byrd

#dust #falls #feet #heard #individual

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential. ↗

— Kofi Annan

#literacy #education

Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself - that is my doctrine. ↗

— Thomas Paine

#freedom #liberty #religion #separation-of-church-and-state #skepticism

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men. ↗

— Leonardo da Vinci

#animals #murder #vegetarianism #age

If political rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are indispensable to make political rights 'real' and keep them in operation. The two rights need each other for their survival; that survival can only be their joint achievement. ↗

— Zygmunt Bauman

#social #social-rights #age