Coming to know one another based on a shared humanity through dialogue is the key to breaking down the walls of isolation and reversing the decline of life-to-life bonds among human beings.
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.
On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.
Iran's continued, widespread persecution of ethnic minorities, human rights defenders and political prisoners is a disgrace and stands as a shameful indictment of Iran's leaders.
No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.
A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.
To me, celebrity doesn't mean a whole lot unless you're willing to use it. So I wanted to use it in a different way, with my AIDS work, the human rights stuff for the gay and lesbian community and the speaking I do.
My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.
Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.
My interest is not data, it's the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers.
I like to think I'm a role model for women. But I also don't like to just limit it to women. I like to think I'm a role model for human beings in general.
I think that the firepower of the Civil War, the numbers of bodies that were left to rot, the numbers of amputations in the Civil War, all of this created threats to the understanding of the human being as an integral soul, as a body and soul that co...
Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses.
The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions - and Iraq may be one of them - when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.
Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don't do it. It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or wri...
I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man's court, Ray had told me, by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a t...
Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight -acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness.” These folks left the film saying it was �...
I know the truth, and I will tell you now: He was admired, loved, cheered, honored, respected. In life as well as in death. A great man, he is. A great man, he was. A great man he will be. He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His...
In the emptiness that was all around me, I noticed an old tennis ball in the plantings; I picked it up and dropped it at Zoë’s feet. I didn’t know what I was doing, if I had a specific intention. Was I trying to lighten the mood? I don’t know,...
