Robert Conquest Quotes

They charge me with fanaticism. If to be feelingly alive to the suffering of my fellow creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.

My daughter is one of my greatest inspirations. She's an environmentalist, she plays piano, she's raising money for the earthquake victims in Nepal. Every day she surprises me and teaches me something.

I'm the type of person who tries to save the world.

I think when I started going to war zones and started covering humanitarian issues, it became a calling because I realized I had a voice, and I can give people without a voice a voice... and now it is something that sits inside of me every day.

I'm not an activist; I don't look for controversy. I'm not a political person, but I'm a person with compassion. I care passionately about equal rights. I care about human rights. I care about animal rights.

You say that your hope is in God, and he will, I am sure, stand by you. But you must not forget that you have been given worldly means to use and employ against human arrogance and wrong; it is necessary to see such things with a broad mind in order to oppose them.

I'd ask myself, 'What do I think is really unjust?' That should be a starting point for how you engage with the world.

I believe in the Corporal Works of Mercy, the Ten Commandments, the American Declaration of Independence and James Connolly’s outline of a socialist society… Most of my life I’ve been called a lunatic because I believe that I am my brother’s keeper. I organize poor and exploited workers, I fight for the civil rights of minorities, and I believe in peace. It appears to have become old-fashioned to make social commitments — to want a world free of war, poverty and disease. This is my religion

There are times … when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.

If you're the person whose problems were solved when you were born, your job is to try and help the people who aren't in that situation. It's very easy to say you're tired of political discussion when all of your problems are solved. I keep trying to think of it that way.

I do not regret the part I have taken in a cause so just and interesting to mankind.

I saw the suffering and I let myself feel it… I saw the injustice and was compelled to do something about it. I changed from being a nun who only prayed for the suffering world to a woman with my sleeves rolled up, living my prayer.

I hope that's what I've taught my girls - to be fair, to recognize their own position and their own good fortune, to use their voices to make things better. Beyond that, I'd tell them just to be kind.

I will never be ok with the suffering of others - that I will likely continue to fight so I must treat it as a marathon race not a sprint.

It's really important to me to show the interconnectedness of things. I always try to illustrate how environmentalism, humanitarianism, animal rights - all those things - are one and the same.

Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.

I choose to identify with the underprivileged, I choose to give my life for the hungry, I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity . . . this is the way I'm going. If it means suffering, I'm going that way. If it means dying for them, I'm going that way, because I heard a voice saying DO SOMETHING FOR OTHERS.

How can I act in an impersonal manner? When a man dies in the street for want of food, how can I ignore him? When I find a starving or naked man in the street, I cannot walk past him. I think no human being can do that.

Compassion allows us to bear witness to suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal.

Help and you will abolish apathy-the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil.

I began to realise that we are all oppressed which is why I would like to do something about it, though I'm not sure where my place is.

I don't feel there is any spiritual or metaphysical justification for turning our backs on human suffering.

[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty.

If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.

Let it never be said by future generations that indifference, cynicism or selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideals of humanism which the Nobel Peace Prize encapsulates. Let the strivings of us all, prove Martin Luther King Jr. to have been correct, when he said that humanity can no longer be tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war.