Quotes About Compassion

We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals—from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly—but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves anymore.

Ezekiel and Linda Emanuel

There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible.

judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish: it can only add a second atrocity to the original one.

My own theory is that the spectacle of the homeless may be necessary to keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow...

Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night.

The cockroach who is dying and the woman who is blind agree not to notice each other's shame.

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.

Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other.

If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others.

We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable.

What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face?

And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters.

There was a pain in Muriel to become herself that engaged my heart. I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed. Sometimes her words both thrilled me and made me weep.

Om tegen de weersomstandigheden bestand te zijn moesten we steen worden, en nu stoten we ons bont en blauw aan de dichtstbijzijnde ander.

We can learn to mother ourselves.

Poor souls. I feel so sorry for them.

CAPTAIN. Yes, I'm crying, even though I am a man. But has not a man eyes? Has not a man hands, organs, senses, affections, passions? Does he not live by the same food, is he not hurt with the same weapons, is he not warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a woman is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? Why should a man not complain, a soldier weep?* Because it's unmanly! Why is it unmanly? LAURA