994 – “Let us labor to add all needful guarantees for the more perfect security of free thought, free speech, and free press, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion.”

-Ulysses S Grant, 18th President of the United States of America

742 – Eleanor Roosevelt on Universal Human Rights

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.

Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”

–Eleanor Roosevelt

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697 – “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

–Drafting Committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Draft Committee Members:
Eleanor Roosevelt (Chair), USA; Peng Chun Chang, Republic of China; Charles Habib Malik, Lebanon; William Roy Hodgson, Australia; Hernán Santa Cruz, Chile; René Cassin, France; Alexander E. Bogomolov, Soviet Union; Charles Dukes, UK; John Peters Humphrey, Canada

660 – “When medieval writers spoke of natural law as being discoverable by reason, they meant that the best human reasoning could discover it, and not, of course, that the results to which any and every individual’s reasoning led him was natural law.”

–J L Brierly

656 – Eisenhower’s Kinship Among Nations Quote

“Kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity of size and age. Rather we should turn to those inner things — call them what you will — I mean those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess. To preserve his freedom of worship, his equality before law, his liberty to speak and act as he sees fit, subject only to provisions that he trespass not upon similar rights of others….”

–Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States of America

29 years ago today, in 1989, Mauerfall began when East and West Berliners joined together and began dismantling the Berlin Wall, which would eventually lead to the fall of the Iron Curtain and preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union.

493 – “Protests and marches eventually die down but that does not mean movements end. They carry on behind the scenes, trudging along to make steady and lasting change. I see the promise of more civically engaged young people doing just this. They are engaged to stand up—whether it is gun violence, immigration rights, or any other issue that will inspire them. But they are not sitting idly by.”

–Roger Brooks, President and CEO of Facing History and Ourselves.

464 – “Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.”

–Transparency International

437 – Antonin Scalia on Second Amendment Rights

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. … For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. … Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

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–Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

406 – “Here I stand, one girl among many. I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated.”

“I raise up my voice not so that I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be
heard.”

–Malala Yousafzai [See Source Notes for reason there are two quotes]

354 – “There’s really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

–Arundhati Roy