George McGovern Quotes

I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that's ever happened to me has taught me compassion.

What breaks my heart is suffering of any kind. Too often, our world is divisive and cruel where it needs to be uniting and loving.

I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

With the poor people of this world I will cast my lot and share their fate.

Throughout my life, I always remember that consideration of people who were less fortunate than we. We lived in an atmosphere of awareness, and we certainly did not live a life whereby we ignored, or felt that we could ignore, that which was in evidence around us.

We all bleed the same color. It hurts when we bleed.

I think the reason I've been so committed to advocacy is because I see so many people in pain.

The amount of suffering I've seen is beyond belief. The amount of inequality is beyond belief.

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

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

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

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.

I have this soft spot for have-nots. So, I was really inclined to portray their pain and pathos in 'Highway.'

How can you satisfy your hunger while your neighbor is spending the night hungry?

It blows my mind that anyone could be unkind to anyone.

So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.

Never elated when someone's oppressed, never dejected when another one's blessed.

It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.

There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.

Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills.