Joanne Liu Quotes

What is perhaps more worthy of note than how many tsunami dead we've seen, however, is how many other recent dead we have not seen.

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

As we all know, many people remain buried under tons of rubble and debris, waiting to be rescued. When we think of their suffering, we feel deeply and profoundly that we should be there, in Haiti, with them, trying our best to prevent death.

I've seen suffering first-hand, and we have to make sure we relieve people's suffering.

One man's death: that is a catastrophe. A hundred thousand dead: that is a statistic

Anyone that's involved in development has discovered that all the good work that's been done in development has been undone by the AIDS emergency.

What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

United Nations peacekeepers are going all over the world spreading AIDS even while they're trying to bring peace. What a supreme irony.

Leaving American disaster victims to languish is morally reprehensible and un-American.

Are some women and children going to die? Yeah. But it's doing the right thing. You got money, you sit around talking about peace. People who don't have money need some help.

In violent streets and broken homes, the cry of anguished souls is not for more laws but for more conscience and character.

Every time I come to the States, I wish people would react to war like they react to tobacco, for example. Because war really kills in a second lots of people, thousands of people.

When people said Africa would change me, I didn't understand what they meant. To see the poverty in the townships, for instance, is overwhelming. I found it heart-wrenching to see young children walking barefoot and hungry in the dirt. I'm the kind of person who wants to change the world right here and now, so I got frustrated.

I really connect with those moments of doing missionary work down there and just seeing the people that are dying from disease and hunger and malnutrition.

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

There is a lot that happens around the world we cannot control. We cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot prevent droughts, and we cannot prevent all conflict, but when we know where the hungry, the homeless and the sick exist, then we can help.

When you see people suffering and dying and hungry, this job gives you the ability to do something about it.

The cry of the poor for bread has been answered by warheads!

It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics.

The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

Why be shocked at the drowning of a few if there is no objection to starving a nation?

I said I would never wear my gold again because it would be insensitive and disrespectful to all the people who died and lost everything in Katrina.

It's one thing to see the suffering and dying on the television screen and quite another to be there and experience it. You cannot look into the eyes of a starving child and yourself remain the same.

I had four combat tours, and I never saw death on a scale like I saw in Haiti. A quarter-million people lost their lives.

I always say now it's the indifference that kills patients in the field and different populations. We have to break our indifference towards the suffering of people elsewhere.