Bertrand Russell Quotes

When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.

While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight While little children go hungry, as they do now, I'll fight While men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight While there is a drunkard left, While there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, While there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight-I'll fight to the very end!

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.

Poor man. Poor mankind.

Compassion allows us to bear witness to suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal.

To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.

We now undertake that we cannot rest while millions of our people suffer the pain and indignity of poverty in all its forms.

My soul refuses to be satisfied so long as it is a helpless witness of a single wrong or a single misery.

Is there anything more true than human pain? Is there anything more sincere than the cry for help from those who suffer? Only a great wave of mankind's pity can surmount an immense wave of human misery?

You, I, we all encounter behaviors that we might say, I wouldn't do that. But she has a huge amount of contact with how people live. She sees more hospices and sink estates than most people.

One day I was sitting in my own pain, and suddenly all the pain and troubles of the world came to me. I received all the pain of the world, all through my body.

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

It is part of my faith as a Muslim to try to help those who are suffering from poverty or economic or political injustice.

People aren't very good at other people's pain.

If you feel more emotion looking at a picture of queuing lorries than a picture of desperate humans living in a lay-by, you need to check your bedtime routine for someone beating you round the head with a meat tenderiser.

Human suffering is not, nor should it ever be, a political issue.

Serve humanity, regardless of religion. Show solidarity for those suffering and oppressed.

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

I hate that she's hurt. I hate that she's been hurt, by me and by others, throughout the entire arc of her life. I barely remember pain, but when I see it in her I feel it in myself, in disproportionate measure. it creeps into my eyes, stinging, burning.

We must see Christ in the disturbing disguise of the poor.

You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death. You have to wade through to record them.

Life's unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves.

I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?