Simone Weil Quotes

I cannot tell how much my heart suffered for my people while at Leavenworth.

There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.

I'm not a member of a minority but I can empathize with what's going on.

I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that's ever happened to me has taught me compassion.

You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I will always be on the side of those who have nothing.

Only the tortured can understand those who have been tortured.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered.

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

None knows the weight of another's burden.

We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

What breaks my heart is suffering of any kind. Too often, our world is divisive and cruel where it needs to be uniting and loving.

The cry of the oppressed has entered not only into my ears, but into my soul, so that while I live, I cannot hold my peace.

The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.

In my work, I'm always trying not to put barriers up between the 'good poor' and the 'bad poor.' I'm not sure my work will change things much, but at the very least, you want to make people feel that they are not alone.

I like someone who's suffered from both sides.

Revolution applies a local anaesthetic to one class of society and operates on the other.

I have this soft spot for have-nots. So, I was really inclined to portray their pain and pathos in 'Highway.'

If we accept the rule of those who think they are the bosses and lords of Mexico, nothing will change for the people on the bottom.