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"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America."
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"I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully."

"The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right."

"Terror doesn't change people from gay to straight. It just hurts innocent people."

"Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International, with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opinion is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina and Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx."

"The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view."

"Those who deny any group of people human rights are really denying the humanity of that group - and their own."

"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America."
Explore more quotes by Jimmy Carter

"It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever."

"At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes."

"The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity."

"Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood."

"We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war."
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