Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself.

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.

What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.

Philanthropy and social change work are at their best when they are driven by your values and connected to what you care about most.

You really can change the world if you care enough.

If you care enough, you make a difference.

The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice.

When you give as a family, not only are you sharing the happiness that giving brings you by watching it translate into positive change, but you are also transmitting your giving values to your children by engaging them in the giving process itself.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.

I feel that I have such an abundance in my life, and once you've seen how many people suffer and how little it takes for you to actually change their lives for the better, it's hard not to do something.

I think my dad is this great, wonderful... man with a lot of integrity, who is fighting for things he believes in and is serious in what he wants to see happen and serious in helping people.

We do not have to accept the world as we find it. And we have a responsibility to leave our world a better place and never walk by on the other side of injustice.

What is the purpose of our might if we do not use it for good.

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

It takes us many years to learn that the passion for justice and the welfare of all, once it has been aroused, is the deepest one in moral life.

Please give your life to peace, justice and care.

Children teach us to be courageous and to stand up against injustice.

Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.

Compassion and justice are companions, not choices.

How can I act in an impersonal manner? When a man dies in the street for want of food, how can I ignore him? When I find a starving or naked man in the street, I cannot walk past him. I think no human being can do that.

I saw the suffering and I let myself feel it… I saw the injustice and was compelled to do something about it. I changed from being a nun who only prayed for the suffering world to a woman with my sleeves rolled up, living my prayer.

Begun as a girl from a little country town in central western Queensland, inspired by noble ideas of justice, about fairness, about making the world a better place.

This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century - solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.

While I believe in all that freedom, I also believe that no one should suffer needlessly.