Voltairine de Cleyre Quotes

When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans.

To exult over the miseries of an unhappy creature is inhuman.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

It is only out of ignorance that people are cruel, because they really don't think it will come back.

I believe that to knowingly commit actions that cause or condone suffering is reprehensible in the extreme. I call upon you to be compassionate and treat others as you want to be treated. If you don't want to be beaten, imprisoned, mutilated, killed or tortured then you shouldn't condone such behavior towards anyone, be they human or not.

Truly, I would not hang a dog by my will, much more a man who hath any honesty in him.

One shouldn't be afraid of the humans. Well, I am not afraid of the humans, but of what is inhuman in them.

There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.

When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness.

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.

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

Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

I don't understand how people can take a gentle, loving life and treat it with such cruelty.

You who feel no pain at the suffering of others It is not fitting for you to be called human.

I am not going to change who I am. I am human and I know how to love, and be kind, and be compassionate to those who are weaker than me. Just because I have power doesn't mean I have to use it!

Human beings who blind themselves to human need make themselves less human.

Unless a man has pity he is not truly a man. If a man has not wept at the worlds pain he is only half a man, and there will always be pain in the world, knowing this does not mean that a man shall dispair. A good man will seek to take pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself, and the poor unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes.

Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.

Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave - and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.

people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.

Cruelty is the only sin.

Humans are not really very humane.

There are people who have lost every trace of human kindness.

It's such a simple thing, really. It's an awareness that the other people in the world are other people, and that you are one of them. That every time you have a chance to help somebody out, to do what's right instead of what you think you're supposed to do, you should do it.