And Ronald Reagan, he won the cold war, helped to make the world much safer for democracy and for the universal decencies of humanity.
"The best thing you can do to uphold the universal decencies of mankind, the best thing that you can do to ensure that the best values of our world are realised is to stop the boats and that's exactly what we have done".
"I'm all for general decency.
They established the United Nations and agreed a simple set of universal standards of decency for mankind to cling to: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The modern idea of a universal standard of decency — that what goes on in some obscure country might be your and my business — still holds power over millions of people, even if their actions or inactions betray it.
"Human rights" are not a phrase to be cynically parroted by the world's worst violators sitting on a grotesquely misnamed Human Rights Council, but a real and universal criterion of decency.
It embodies the fact that Britain remains a nation where key universal benchmarks of human decency and protections against state abuse are upheld by the courts – upheld, in some cases, against governments that may be tempted to bow the knee to newspapers demanding arbitrary abuse of rights.
Then there's the universal law of human decency.
His writings – which are widely consulted today –reflect his belief, as one colleague put it, that international law is "a translation of natural decency, rationality and universal values into its professional language", an approach "based on principles of legal normativism, legal completeness and absolute justice".
This article is a call to recognize and appreciate and acknowledge that the Tigers have become Lambs and that the commitment to the principles enshrined in common decency and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is worth working for in the Tamil community and for all peoples.
