Quotes About Compassion

Most people are playing the game of compounding interest, which is self interest - how do they take care of themselves and produce more for themselves, storing value for their own benefit. I play a different game. A game I call 'compounding impact.' How do you make a positive impact in the world?

I am very aware that there are many of you who have friends and loved ones in the areas affected by this storm who have been displaced or who have not yet been accounted for.

The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else's story.

Everyone's story is different, and we can't really be inside them.

When you are doing a real life story, it requires a lot of sensitivity, a lot of responsibility.

One of the saddest things in this world is to see a child grow up hating one of their parents because they only got one side of the story.

When you're drinking from a creek, it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story.

I think my mission, if I could call it that, as a storyteller is to try and find ways to show how similar we are and not how different we are.

You get told a lot in school to tell what you know, write what you know. But what excites me about filmmaking, about being a storyteller, is being able to learn about other people, putting myself in somebody else's shoes, whether that be someone from the Dominican Republic or someone from Cuba or inner-city Brooklyn.

Part of our job as storytellers is to show people pockets of the world that they don't know. The more we understand, the more we don't judge.

I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.

I want to be part of the storytelling that educates people and awakens a sense of compassion in other people of the kind of people they don't encounter in their daily lives very frequently.

The best way to bring people in and have them empathize with others is through storytelling.

I think there's a lot of people going through different things where you feel like your whole world's imploded, and you feel like you lost it all, whether it's physical, emotional, whatever you're going through. If I can be that beacon of hope for people that need it the most through dancing and through our storytelling, then I've done my job.

Man, if you're gay we can be friends. If you're straight, we can be friends. I'm not gay, I don't plan on being gay, I don't condone it and I'm not sayin' I'm against it.

Let's be honest - tracking down, rounding up, and deporting millions of people isn't realistic. Anyone who suggests otherwise isn't being straight with you. It's also not who we are as Americans.

I've learnt that over the years, sometimes I was caring so much about how other people felt, I wasn't standing up for myself and I wasn't caring about how I felt even when people were straight up bullying me online.

You can't just carry everyone else's hopes and fears around in your backpack and expect to stand up straight.

I'm straight and I have a lot of gay friends.

It's important not to lose sight of the fact people of all sorts are still putting themselves at risk. It happens to straight and gay, single and married. I have never been comfortable thinking of AIDS as something that 'other people' get.

As straight Americans we have two choices: we can choose to sit back and enjoy our rights as we have them, or we can realize that it is actually not freedom at all when our friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues do not share these basic rights.

I feel sorry for straight people.

It is straightforward for me to be ethical, responsible, and kind-hearted because I have the resources to support that.

It is always a strain when people are being killed. I don't think anybody has held this job who hasn't felt personally responsible for those being killed.