Eric Walters Quotes

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

You walk past people in streets, or they serve you in shops, and you know nothing about the horrors they may be living with.

I always think you have to show a degree of humanity and sensitivity when you're dealing with people in extreme circumstances.

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.

I try to understand people who do violence. I try to understand what they are feeling and experiencing.

The worst effect of student violence has been to excite liberals who assume that behind every act of violence there is a condition of injustice, and who take it as their guilty responsibility to eradicate the cause.

A change of mentality is needed, no longer seeing the poor as a burden, or as intruders trying to profit from others, but as people seeking to share the goods of the world so that we can create a just and prosperous world for all.

It’s bullshit. When people are dying, bureaucracy should be thrown out. I saw a guy kill himself at the Superdome. Two policemen have committed suicide.

I think a lot of Americans have never been all that hungry. They've never had war on their shore, and they've never suffered the way other cultures have suffered. I'm not saying we should go suffer. Not at all. I'm saying we should be more aware of how other cultures exist.

I started working at a soup kitchen in skid row of Los Angeles when I was 13 years old, and the first day, I felt really scared. I was young, and it was rough and raw down there, and though I was with a great volunteer group, I just felt overwhelmed.

What do you do when your world is falling apart? How do you hold onto the real and the rational? I think that's very relatable for people.

One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug.

I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.

People tend not to dwell on drama.

The premise for me has always been that it's vulnerable people who do violent things. And the more vulnerable they feel, often, the more violent they are. But I think, you know, that's an idea that comes from history, from classical theater, for me.

I don't like to see anyone suffer, and there's a very, very fine line between being healthy and working and totally down and out.

Half of Syria's refugees are children, and we know what can happen to children who grow to adulthood without hope or opportunity in refugee camps. The camps become fertile recruiting grounds for violent extremists.

I actually met a cop who worked with street gangs. I wanted to understand what drives someone who deals with very hardened criminals on a daily basis. How do you turn that off when you go home at night?

We need to ask questions about how we're going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home.

I don't think people who are already burdened with social, economic, psychological situations, dysfunctional families, need to be burdened with other people with the same problems.

Like the suffering child, gang members act out of their despair, and their actions are all the more alarming now for our not having heeded their cry long ago. The shortsighted neglect that keeps us locked up in our outrage has also kept us from viable solutions.

We see people talking to themselves all the time. We always have. Particularly if they're homeless people or at all questionable, there's a sense of, 'That guy's crazy!' I see that now with a much more empathetic eye.

I can't remember how old I was, maybe 13, 14, and to see these fellows and hear their stories and to see life come to such a drab ending - my God, a poorhouse in those days was something. You would have to be inert not to respond to it.

In India, there's so much strife, pain and trouble that song, dance and going to the movies is respite.

I am a psycho therapist and I used to teach street children.