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.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.

There are people who want to make men’s lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute – a white skin.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.

I believe that a child going without an education is a crime.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat.

Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.

I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I’ve always done it in private.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‚sophisticated‘ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

My son Emilio is running for Congress to continue the fight for social justice.

Real living is living for others.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

We’re a blip in the existence of the universe, and we’re constantly trying to pull each other down. Not doing things to help each other.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

I don’t join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn’t have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven – that’s none of my business, ultimately. I won’t lecture her on the philosophy of science.

Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?

My protest about the post exchange seating bore some results. More seats were allocated for blacks, but there were still separate sections for blacks and for whites. At least I had made my men realize that something could be accomplished by speaking out, and I hoped they would be less resigned to unjust conditions.

The man who could go to Africa and rob her of her children, and then sell them into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hand.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

A gender line… helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

It is necessary to help others, not only in our prayers, but in our daily lives. If we find we cannot help others, the least we can do is to desist from harming them.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering – an image of death.

You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that’s something that we should think about.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight.

It would make everything I worked for meaningless if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It’s when you go backwards through the ‚begats‘ and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, ‚Hang on, that’s a big punishment for eating one lousy apple… There’s a human-rights issue.‘

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

And every human being is precious.

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don’t regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

States should have the right to enact laws… particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

I was never focused on me, me, me all the time. I was always focused on somebody else.

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.