Leonard Cohen Quotes

Honestly, the pains of humanity have been draining me.

Many people today in the developed countries are so far removed from poverty and suffering and starvation that they lack empathy for the sufferings of others.

Acting is, to me now, artificial. Seeing people suffer is real. It couldn't be more real. Some people don't like to look at it in the face because it's painful. But if nobody does, then nothing gets done.

The people with very hard problems are understood by God. He knows what wretched machines they are trying to drive. Some day he will fling them away and give those people new ones; then they may astonish everyone, for they learned their driving in a hard school. Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.

if there is a god, he sure hates people

Mankind's suffering belongs to all men.

War is cruel to the people, and terrible to the conquered.

We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering.

The amount of poverty and suffering required for a Rockefeller to emerge, and the amount of depravity entailed in the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible for the popular forces to expose this clearly.

It should be remembered that hundreds of people of African ancestry also walked the Trail of Tears with the Cherokee during the forced removal of 1838-1839. Although we know about the terrible human suffering of our native people and the members of other tribes during the removal, we rarely hear of those black people who also suffered.

Why should some people have such a hard time during their few years on this earth?

Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers.

I am deeply saddened by the suffering of the Iraqi people.

I really have no idea where the darkness comes from. Other writers have said that there are two subjects worth writing about, love and death; and since I'm a complete flop when it comes to love, I chose death. Too, maybe because of where I came from, I do find it easy to empathise with and write about certain groups of damaged or downtrodden people: the poor, the addicted.

We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.

Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?

People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.

If people would just wake up to what's real, there would be no misery in the world. I guess chanting's a pretty good place to start.

Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world - access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms.

In the struggle of good against evil, it's always the people who get killed.

There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.

Today people are suffering from poverty, but also from lack of love