To answer that question, we can draw inspiration from those who made a difference and helped create the human rights we have today. These humanitarians stood up for human rights because they recognized that peace and progress can never be achieved without them. Each, in a significant way, changed the world.
Martin Luther King, Jr., when championing the rights of people of color in the United States in the 1960s, declared, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The great advocate of peaceful resistance to oppression, Mahatma Gandhi, described nonviolence as “the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”
Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, declared that “The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”
There are those who, through thought and action, have made a difference and changed our world. Among them are the following humanitarians, each a powerful and effective advocate and each an inspiration to all who today dedicate themselves to the cause of universal rights:
