Quotes About Suffering

Tell me how to stop it. Seeing all their lives, all the time. How do you stop seeing it? There is so much pain and I don't not how to not notice it. It's not me, I'm not hurting, it's them, it's everyone. It never stops- do you understand?

The non-profit industry itself, "the most dysfunctional $300 billion industry in the world," as he saw it. Mullaney had come to believe that too many philanthropists engage in what Peter Buffett, a son of the über-billionaire Warren Buffett, calls "conscience laundering"—doing charity to make themselves feel better rather than fighting to figure out the best ways to alleviate suffering.

It is understandable, therefore, that the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion. The core belief is that humankind inherited a pristine Eden, has sinned greatly by polluting it, and must now suffer lest we all perish in a fiery apocalypse.

paid $2.50 to smother a baby girl born with a cleft deformity

plague years of the 1600s

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities. . . . I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.

animals are often fed mechanically, so their only human contact comes, and this is only in the case of breeder dogs, in the form of artificial insemination and, nine weeks later, a pair of hands snatching babies away. If Dante

There wasn't anything wrong with these dogs. I wanted to take them all home with me. The whole damn warehouse of misery. Just strap it to my back and get the fuck out of the way.

harming the other are massively outweighed by the disadvantages we would suffer in being harmed (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits).

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.

The improved odds of a natural death came with another price, captured by the Roman historian Tacitus: "Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws." The Bible stories we examined in chapter 1 suggest that the first kings kept their subjects in awe with totalistic ideologies and brutal punishments.

The God of the Hebrew Bible, ever merciful, told the first woman, "I will multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.

No one can deny the difference between life and death or the existence of suffering, but it takes indoctrination to hold beliefs about what becomes of an immortal soul after it has parted company from the body.

It's not just that there are two sides to every dispute. It's that each side sincerely believes its version of the story, namely that it is an innocent and long-suffering victim and the other side a malevolent and treacherous sadist.

Norberg, drawing on Braudel, offers vignettes of this era of misery, when the definition of poverty was simple: "if you could afford to buy bread to survive another day, you were not poor.

Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal's claws....

Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale by curing disease, feeding the hungry, saving the lives of infants and mothers, and allowing women to control their fertility.

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes

It's highly unpleasant to be gassed, but then it's just as unpleasant to be perforated or shredded by pieces of metal.

And with an average trial length at the time of eight and a half minutes, it is certain that many of the people sent to the gallows were innocent.67 Rummel estimates that between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

En resumen, sin la posibilidad de sufrir, lo que tendríamos no sería una dicha armoniosa, sino que, al contrario, careceríamos por completo de conciencia.

However much we suffer for the love of Jesus Crucified, it is but little.

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

She will love deeply--suffer terribly--she will have glorious moments to compensate.