Barack Obama Quotes

I can't read the newspaper without crying. I'm easily affected by horrible events, you see.

People love to be listened to and represented, and they love it when they feel like you have some of the same problems that they do. Everybody deals with things like romantic difficulties in relationships and death and cancer and abuse.

If I hear about a tsunami that hit Asia, hundreds of people have lost their lives, and you see it and you hear about it, but you still brush your teeth, still have to go on with your day. But let you get information about one person who you're close to or you're intimate with, it has an almost paralyzing effect.

It's very simple, I just tell my sad story, and people weep.

You do not see the river of mourning because it lacks one tear of your own.

The condition of the wounded touched my heart deeply.

Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief? Can I see a falling tear, And not feel my sorrow's share? Can a father see his child Weep, nor be with sorrow filled? Can a mother sit and hear An infant groan, an infant fear? No, no! never can it be! Never, never can it be!

Knowing that others have gone through similar tragedies may be a help, but it should be remembered that every tragedy is not only commonplace but also unique.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

At That Moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay. It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

I might be better able to help parents of dying children, but for quite a while I felt less able, too emotionally involved. And from that time on, I could rarely discuss the death of a child without tears welling up into my eyes.

He watched and wept and prayed and felt for all

Don't tell me about the pain. Show me the baby.

Something touched me deep inside The day the music died.

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

I recall the night that President McKinley died. I was working at the time at a theatre in St. Louis. The oppressive feeling was in the air. I could not make the people laugh.

Reviewers and critics can be overly cynical. If something the least bit sentimental comes up, they'll often start flying off the handle. But I'm like, 'Wait a minute, you've had those times in your life. Everybody has.'

I look away at car crashes, and I know people who look away at car crashes, because it makes us uncomfortable to watch other people in pain.

There's no greater way to gain an audience's sympathy than by being unfortunate.

You hear about people your whole life, 'So-and-so has cancer,' and you're like, 'Wow, that's too bad,' and then most people tend to go about their day. But when someone tells you that it's your father or it's your family, that doesn't tend to go away.

But if somebody dies, if something happens to you, there is a normal process of depression, it is part of being human, and some people view it as a learning experience etc.

As a photographer who is constantly in violent, bloody situations where the instinct is to turn away, I am always trying to figure out how to make people not turn away.

I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.