From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
To me the question is, why are we denying them the obvious rights they should have? They are flesh and blood, they feel pain as we do, they experience joy, they have their own behaviours and their own languages among themselves that they understand and we don't. They have maternal instincts and look after each other as we do… it's not an intellectual thing when a mother protects her child; it's an instinctive behaviour.
Rather than politicising our cultural challenges, we have to allow people to feel comfortable about their culture and about who they are, and to accept each other as equals.
Disability is an impairment, but an impairment is not necessarily a disability. The interaction of an impairment with the social barriers that surround you may or may not turn that impairment into a disability. For example; I am a wheelchair user, and If I see a building in front of me with three steps, I cannot get into it. If I cannot get into it, it's not because I'm on a wheelchair; it's because the building has 3 steps. If the same building had a ramp, my wheelchair would not be an impairment and I could easily get into the building.
Even when I reached the top, I never forgot where I came from. I wondered about the millions of my fellow countrymen who didn't have the chance I got and continued to languish in poverty.
Tonight, anyone who truly understands what justice is and what it requires of a society is ashamed to call himself an American.
Firstly, pay has to be high enough to give people agency in their own lives and secondly, humans have to be treated like humans. Those are the minimum conditions for good jobs – there also needs to be a career path that enables people to learn and grow in their jobs.
Some foreign dictatorial regimes are bypassing traditional lobbying shops altogether and directly recruiting sitting members of Congress to act as foreign agents.
History is the story of those who wrote it… I have been trying very hard to add people back into the history of art who should have been there all along. I see this like Pompeii, these artists exist, but they're covered in ash. We must excavate them.
We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don't have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys.
In order to fix bias you have to admit to them, you have to admit they exist and bring them out of the shadows. Then you can call them out. We have to stop pretending that there's no adversity, or that we can't do anything about the adversity we face.
Today's world reveals a sad truth: impunity for international crimes is more common than prosecutions. Justice and accountability remain the exception rather than the rule.
In my experience, unless you are directly affected by a human rights abuse, you are unlikely to give it a second thought. How many times do you draw breath a day? It's about 22,000 times – you don't think about it until you can't. That's exactly how most people view human rights- they are generally apathetic and may express some concern or sympathy when they hear about something on the news, but they don't mobilise unless it affects them directly.