Top 100 Civil Quotes
#1. During the civil war, the Sudanese government armed the Misseriya nomads as proxy. Even though both groups had coexisted quite well prior to the conflict, it all become much more difficult as a consequence.
Rebecca Hamilton
#2. What gets lost is that the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.
Rand Paul
#5. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.
Edwin Gaustad
#6. Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.
Arthur Hertzberg
#7. [H]aving the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.
Glenn Greenwald
#8. All depend upon the engagement of as many people as possible on all levels, from civil society to national leaders, to advocate for the kind of national and international commitments, legislation, and public/ private partnerships that can make the difference.
Queen Noor Of Jordan
#9. This was our language: half-truths, obvious lies, accusations neither one of us would ever make. It was a system eery bit as complicated as Morse code or the dancing of bees. Don't ask, don't tell, stay civil.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#10. Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.
Claire McCaskill
#11. That we should obey laws whether good or bad is a new-fangled notion. There was no such thing in former days. The people disregarded those laws they did not like and suffered the penalties for their breach.
Mahatma Gandhi
#12. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle
#13. Civil disobedience is the assertion of a right which law should give but which it denies.
Mahatma Gandhi
#14. After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.
William J. Brennan
#15. Secretary [John] Kerry has called Civil War [in Syria] an unbelievably small war that we're going to get involved with.
Rand Paul
#16. The British civil service ... is a beautifully designed and effective braking mechanism.
Shirley Williams
#17. There was no miracle that night ...
Ed King
#18. A civil ruler dabbling in religion is as reprehensible as a clergyman dabbling in politics. Both render themselves odious as well as ridiculous.
James Gibbons
#19. Some of the greatest spiritual revivals in the past occurred just when the situation seemed to be the darkest. In the history of our own nation, for example, countless thousands turned to Christ during the darkest days of the Civil War, setting the stage for national reconciliation later on.
Billy Graham
#20. I would define liberty to be a power to do as we would be done by. The definition of liberty to be the power of doing whatever the law permits, meaning the civil laws, does not seem satisfactory.
John Adams
#21. Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How 'substantial' does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal?
Nancy Gibbs
#22. Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre - Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero-, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread.
David S. Reynolds
#23. One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.
Alice Walker
#24. Changes to parliamentary procedure won't transform the lives of the people whom I represent. Decentralising, devolving decision-making and renewing civil society will.
David Blunkett
#25. Too often, advances in civil rights or women's rights are undermined by wrong-headed legislation or weak-kneed political leadership.
Mike Quigley
#26. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
Umberto Eco
#27. Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.
Blaise Pascal
#28. There are 435 members of Congress. There's one 'Morning Joe' show. Hopefully, we can keep hammering the argument that you can disagree with other people and have debates but remain civil.
Joe Scarborough
#29. I admired Truman, among many other things, because he integrated the Army. I admired JFK because the very first civil rights legislation was passed at his insistence. JFK showed what you could do, though he was a deeply flawed person, as we all now know.
Jed S. Rakoff
#30. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: "I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."34
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
#31. If you look at attitudes today and where they are headed, it's clear to me that supporting equal rights, including the rights to civil marriage, is a net positive for winning elections, as well as the right thing to do.
Ken Mehlman
#32. Everything he's learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Collection hung on your office wall, or the quality of your carpet.
Charles Stross
#33. Every man by nature is a freeman born; by nature no man cometh out of the womb under any civil subjection to king, prince, or judge.
Samuel Rutherford
#34. Every advance in this half-century-Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another-came with the support and leadership of American Labor.
Jimmy Carter
#35. I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.
Daniel Woodrell
#36. Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.
Stephen Hawking
#37. With the likely nominations of Barack Obama by the Democrats and John McCain by the Republicans, one of these two parties is headed for a 2009 crack-up that could prove as messy as any party civil war in recent history.
Chuck Todd
#38. The Crows are very handsome and gentlemanly Indians in their personal appearance: and have been always reputed, since the first acquaintance made with them, very civil and friendly.
George Catlin
#39. When you're fighting for civil rights, it's sometimes two steps forward and one step back. Civil rights are an evolution; and you have to bring people along.
Gloria Allred
#40. But who is to decide who truly fears the Lord? The magistrate has no power to enforce religious demands. The laws of the First Table of the Ten Commandments are not regulations for a civil society or a political order. They belong to the realm of religion, not politics.
Roger Williams
#41. Even to an outsider like myself, not only in the theatre was such disunity evident, but in much else in government Spain. Alvarez del Vayo, Socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, once asked, Why is it Spain's people are so great, but her leaders so small?
Langston Hughes
#42. If you're going to live here, staying civil is as much a duty as sitting the steps or washing dishes. Now, while I bask in the glow of another moral sermon delivered with the precision of a master fencer, hold your applause and let's get back to last night.
Scott Lynch
#43. There are a million Negroes in Mississippi. I think they'll take care of me.
James Meredith
#44. Civil confusions often spring from trifles but decide great issues.
Aristotle.
#45. It is important for the children of God to know their active civil position in critical times in their country
Sunday Adelaja
#46. We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. Ty Cobb was still fighting the Civil War, and as far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees. But who knows, if he hadn't had that terrible persecution complex, he never would have been about the best ballplayer who ever lived.
Sam Crawford
#48. England's civil war had ended in a consensus as the English discovered that they hated foreigners more than they hated their own countrymen.
Len Deighton
#49. I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
Jerry Spinelli
#50. He wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was very patriotic.
Charles Dickens
#52. Before this war is over, I intend to be a Major General or a corpse.
Isaac R. Trimble
#53. Republicans are horrible with civil liberties, and not so good with dollars and cents. Democrats are horrible with dollars and cents, and not so good with civil liberties.
Gary Johnson
#54. Joe Arpaio needs no help from me getting attention. For years he has been a beacon of bigotry and intolerance for all the world to see. The list of human and civil-rights abuses he's committed in Maricopa County is long and well documented.
Conor Oberst
#55. In the criminal justice system you see the worst people on their best behavior, unlike the civil system, where the best people behave at their worst.
Edna Buchanan
#56. So often, we leave the selfless side of ourselves for nights and weekends, for our charity work. It is our duty to inject that into our day-to-day business, into the work that we do, to improve corporations, to improve civil society, and to improve government.
Leila Janah
#57. Stories can educate, elevate, comfort, and afflict those who are too comfortable. They can create community. They can also drive people apart, justify unspeakable crimes, and destroy the most basic concepts of civil society. You
Jonathan Shapiro
#58. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#60. Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals or forts.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#61. The Lebanese civil war was not between the Lebanese; it was a holy war declared on the Christians.
Brigitte Gabriel
#62. Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.
Ernst Junger
#63. I don't have to come back politically, but I would like to do something that will help the people of Thailand. There must be a process under which I can come back. I want to come back to clear the chaos in Thailand, the civil war in Thailand.
Thaksin Shinawatra
#64. I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.
Cory Booker
#65. Any court which undertakes by its legal processes to enforce civil liberties needs the support of an enlightened and vigorous public opinion which will be intelligent and discriminating as to what cases really are civil liberties cases and what questions really are involved in those cases.
Robert H. Jackson
#66. Rebel Number Four" is waiting patiently by the door. I named him "Rebel Number Four," for he is the fourth of his kind I have given the name "Rebel." To many he may be just a hound dog, but to me he is a champion and a friend to the end.
Nancy B. Brewer
#67. A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanctions policy that kills one and a half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most.
Raj Patel
#68. We can only imagine the history of the free world today if, at the end of the Civil War, there had been two countries: the United States and the Confederate States of America.
Douglas Brinkley
#69. The fights for media justice and racial justice have been intertwined since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
Marvin Ammori
#70. He was so handsome I felt like filing a civil lawsuit against his parents, claiming punitive damages, pain and suffering to my psyche.
Penny Reid
#71. It is my hope that the pagan media and academic establishment will implode on the force of its own corruption and stagnation.
Samuel Bowers
#72. When you have an organization that's neither political nor religious and doesn't take part in the civil rights struggle, what can it call itself? It's in a vacuum.
Malcolm X
#73. The so-called civil rights movement as it exists today is used as a Communist program for revolution in America.
Ezra Taft Benson
#75. Because freedom, it turned out, wasn't like a new shoe: you didn't need to break it in. It felt comfortable the first time you tried it on. It wasn't the present that pinched, it was the past.
Dale Peck
#76. As the histories of ancient and modern democracies illustrate, the pressure of political movement in times of war, civil commotion, or general anxiety pushes in the direction of authority, not away from it.
Robert Heilbroner
#77. Well, there's 10 - there's 10 different - there's 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act, and nine out of 10 deal with public institutions and I'm absolutely in favor of. One deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that.
Rand Paul
#78. We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation.
John F. Kennedy
#79. The United States came within a whisker of invading Utah in 1858 and starting a civil war three years before the Civil War. Because the conflict ended up fizzling out, it's not the most dramatic story about the West.
David Roberts
#80. [On John Brown:] The poor wretch is hanged, but from his grave a root of bitterness will spring, the fruit of which at no distant day may be disunion and civil war.
Fanny Kemble
#81. Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.
A.E. Samaan
#82. Our active civil position will lead us to the manifestation of the glory of God in our nation
Sunday Adelaja
#83. Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest.
Sarah Hall
#84. In case we have to shoot Democrats. It happened during the Civil War, and it could happen again.
P. J. O'Rourke
#85. This was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy.
Ishmael Beah
#86. For taxpayers, however, it's [pay equity] a rip-off. And it has nothing to do with gender. Both men and women taxpayers will pay additional money to both men and women in the civil service. That's why the federal government should scrap its ridiculous pay equity law.
Stephen Harper
#87. I'm in the infantry. What you just showed me, for us that's not even good pornography.
Henry V. O'Neil
#88. Our civil position should not depend on the tests and problems we go through
Sunday Adelaja
#89. Today's breakfast consist of rice and a piece of bread fried in a bit of salt pork grease. At least I have my memories of grand banquets and fine foods, but this is all the children have ever known. I suppose it is best not to have anything to compare.
Nancy B. Brewer
#90. Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or a conservative value. It's an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on.
Jerry Falwell
#92. Aggressive civil disobedience should be confined to a vindication of the right of free speech and free association.
Mahatma Gandhi
#93. Our religion was the religion of a Book. Man must be educated on Earth for Heaven. John Quincy Adams
Paul C. Nagel
#94. The bed sheet brigade is bad enough, but the real threat to Americans and human rights today is the plain clothes Klux in the halls of government and certain black-robed Klux on court benches.
Stetson Kennedy
#95. For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man's face. I now Say what I think.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#96. Health is a human necessity; health is a human right
James Lenhart
#97. Gay marriage will be universally accepted in time. But if I may be so bold as to say to gays and lesbians, don't wait for that time to arrive. Just as my father and his generation did not 'wait' for their civil rights, nor should you. The toothpaste ain't going back in the tube. The tide has turned.
John Ridley
#98. Why hadn't she been a detective instead of a goddamn stupid third-class civil rights lawyer? She hated the law. It took an aggressive, assertive personality. She didn't have it. She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#99. I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.
Rita Dove
#100. Paperwork is the religion of the Civil Service. I can just imagine Sir Humphrey Appleby on his deathbed, surround by wills and insurance claim forms, looking up and saying, 'I cannot go yet, God, I haven't done the paperwork.
Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay
