Susan Strasberg Quotes

Men are only as great as they are kind.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

You can't look in the face of adoration and be cruel.

I think I'm a combination of very simple pleasures and the fact I've read a lot of books. I don't think it's a binary opposition across the board in humans and I think I'm an example that it's not. I'm hosting gay marriage rallies and I have tons of guns at home. There's a lot of middle ground in the world and I'm one of those people.

What does it say about us that people who are considered defective are instinctively caring and compassionate?

Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

Humanity has both its beautiful and its ugly sides.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

No one needs to teach you to be mean; we need to be taught to be kind.

Humanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves.

Let us ask what is best - not what is customary. Let us love temperance - let us be just - let us refrain from bloodshed.

We're all living contradictions, trying to survive in a world filled with hypocrites

He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.

Ahimsa is not a matter of mere dietetics: it transcends it.

I believe that the basic nature of human beings is gentle and compassionate. It is therefore in our own interest to encourage that nature, to make it live within us, to leave room for it to develop. If on the contrary we use violence, it is as if we voluntarily obstruct the positive side of human nature and prevent its evolution.

Yes. The way people behave, the paradoxes, the contradictions. All these things we have to live with and still pretend that everything is only black or white. That, I think, is the most interesting thing in human nature. The fact that we have to do one thing and pretend something else. That’s when it becomes very interesting. If you can literally speak the way you feel, then it’s not interesting anymore. It’s when you have to lie that it becomes interesting.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.

Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.

When you love someone, you don't want to hurt them, even if they deserve to be hurt. When you love someone, you want to hurt them, even when they don't deserve to be hurt.

Yes, always avoid violence. In this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

I stopped eating beef at 13 and stopped eating all meat a few years ago. I would feel guilty that what was on my plate was walking around yesterday. Either I could live with that or stop eating meat. I choose the latter, and I'm happier for it.

For Mercy has a human heart Pity, a human face: And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.