A Quote by Kerry Kennedy
The fact is, human rights victories are rarely won by powerful governments or well-armed militaries. More often than not, these battles are led by individuals and small groups of people determined to overcome wrong. Think King, Gandhi, Mandela.
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When I started working in human rights, Eastern Europe was communist, South Africa was under apartheid and South Korea had military rule. All the changes have come about not because of the militaries or government but because small groups of people spoke out against what was unfair and unjust.
Diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving complex problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.
Hackman's paradox: Groups have natural advantages: they have more resources than individuals; greater diversity of resources; more flexibility in deploying the resources; many opportunities for collective learning; and, the potential for synergy. Yet studies show that their actual performance often is subpar relative to "nominal" groups (i.e. individuals given the same task but their results are pooled.) The two most common reasons: groups are assigned work that is better done by individuals or are structured in ways that cap their full potential.
Nelson Mandela represents an enduring example of the human spirit and he proved for eternity that the ideals of democracy and human rights can overcome even the direst of circumstances.
Success is rarely the result of one swell swoop, but more often the culmination of many, many small victories.
The leaders who we admire who have been able to bring great change in the past - Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela - they're all inspirational religious leaders and smart tacticians. It would be nice to find the Muslim Gandhi, wouldn't it?
Democratic governments are not delivering on their promises, which is partly due to the fact that governments are less powerful than they were after the Second World War. There were fewer governments then, but they actually had more political power.
Often, we feel that we need a leader outside of ourselves -a Buddha, a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, Jr.- to show the way. But we have the Buddha inside of us. We have Gandhi and King inside of us as well. We are interconnected. We don't need to wait for some other person to be the change we want to see in the world
By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments... The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments-that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity.
Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong and demonstrably more destructive for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.
When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
Trusting people to be creative and constructive when given more freedom does not imply an overly optimistic belief in the perfectibility of human nature. It is, rather, belief that the inevitable errors and sins of the human condition are far better overcome by individuals working together in an environment of trust and freedom and mutual respect than by individuals working under a multitude of rules, regulations, and restraints imposed upon them by another group of imperfect individuals.
Sexual and reproductive health and rights are universal human rights!They are an indivisible part of the broader human rights and development equation. Their particular power resides in the fact that they deal with the most intimate aspects of our identities as individuals and enable human dignity, which is dependent on control of our bodies, desires and aspirations.
Germany doesn't have a Bill of Rights, England doesn't have a Bill of Rights, nobody else has a Bill of Rights. You know, the United States is very unique, and that is in the Bill of Rights and the fact that one third of the population is armed... nobody's armed in Canada, nobody's armed in England, nobody's armed in Germany, it's amazing, the United States is a really stand alone class act.
If we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone, not just individuals but governments as well.
We, who think like animals living in small groups, must structure a global world. We believe in universal human rights and believe racism and war are wrong. On the other hand, it is our nature to be cooperative and loving almost exclusively with the members of the group to which we feel we belong.
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