Lakhdar Brahimi Quotes

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.

I will always be on the side of those who have nothing.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

I'm not a member of a minority but I can empathize with what's going on.

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.

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.

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

The cry of the oppressed has entered not only into my ears, but into my soul, so that while I live, I cannot hold my peace.

It is my duty to voice the suffering of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.

The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.

I don't hate nobody. I hate certain conditions that are inflicted upon the people - and they're helpless with it.

Abuse a man unjustly, and you will make friends for him.

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

Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.

Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon ... that it is readily regarded as something natural, even by its victims.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I think everybody should have the same anger towards the injustice that's happening and the hatred that's happening, and just fight it with love and compassion.

I have in my bones, and in my blood, the knowledge that you have to help the people who are persecuted.

Poverty is rooted in injustice.

I don't like laughing at people unless they're in a privileged position or if they're in authority. If it's poor people or people who live on the outskirts or on the margins, or the underdog, I'd rather be laughing with them.

The demonization of people who don't have a voice is particularly despicable, and the only thing we can do in our own little way is hold a mirror up to society and kind of say we're better than that.

No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims.

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.