Leo Tolstoy Quotes

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.

Why wouldn't I help? What good reason do I have as a human being with power and a sense of empathy and morality, why wouldn't I do something?

I don't feel there is any spiritual or metaphysical justification for turning our backs on human suffering.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Courage without compassion can wreak havoc on our civilization.

Some will not look on suffering because it creates responsibility.

No man ought to be condemned for exhorting people to pursue justice in a certain line, though he may foresee that in the pursuit of that justice the opposition given to those who are proceeding in a just course may produce collision, and that collision lead to the commission of crime; but our duty, as I conceive, is to seek for the injustice, and there to impute the crime… It is to that injustice, and not to those who pursue a just course for the attainment of a right end, that the guilt is to be ascribed.

If I saw someone in need and I did nothing, I'd be defacing my own humanity.

It is only our humanity that can deliver us from the brutality of our achievements.

I have the kind of conscience that it doesn't feel right if I watch other people suffer and I do nothing about it.

Empathy should not be contingent on our proximity to suffering or the likelihood of it happening to us. Rather, it should stem from a disdain that suffering is happening at all.

True compassion is universal in scope. It is accompanied by a feeling of responsibility.

It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.

Love is the supreme value around which all moral values can be integrated into one ethical system valid for the whole of humanity.

Compassion and justice are companions, not choices.

Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life.

No circumstances can make it necessary for a man to burst in sunder all the ties of humanity.

Compassion is the chief law of human existence.

I was deeply interested in conveying what is a deeply felt conviction of my own. This is simply to suggest that human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity's sake.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality. The term ‘hero’ irritates me greatly – the opposite is true – I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.

I appeal to my fellow scientists to remember their responsibility to humanity.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.