When you truly accept that those children in some far off place in the global village have the same value as you in God’s eyes or even in just your eyes, then your life is forever changed; you see something that you can’t un-see.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

We don’t want two-tier people in America. Those who are legal but not citizens, and citizens.

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

Do everything as in the eye of another.

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?

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

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life, and those that help them should be free from prosecution.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

A saint is tolerant and is attentive to the pleadings of other human beings, not only to spoken messages but to unspoken messages as well.

If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

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

Love… it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.

The day will come – and it is not far off – when the legacy of Lincoln will finally be fulfilled at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when a black man or woman will sit in the Oval Office. When that day comes, the most remarkable thing about it will be how naturally it occurs.

The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren’t in a very good mood.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

I spent years studying the teachings of Patanjali, and he reminded us several thousand years ago that when we are steadfast – which means that we never slip in our abstention of thoughts of harm directed toward others – then all living creatures cease to feel enmity in our presence.

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, and love the offender, yet detest the offence?

A tear dries quickly when it is shed for troubles of others.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

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.

There are so many men and women who hold no distinctive positions but whose contribution towards the development of society has been enormous.

All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. And undocumented immigrants who desperately want to embrace those responsibilities see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.

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

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it.

We have observed that, in society and the world in which we live, selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could look forward to a whole world in which no child will be left behind?

We need to show mercy. I mean, because as much mercy as you show people, that’s the mercy you’re going to be receiving.

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.

My mother told me, ‚Son, nobody else but God knows.‘ And that’s what I’m about – reaching out to the people, crying with them, giving them hope. Visiting the hospital, visiting the kids with cancer, visiting the adults, and stuff like that. That’s what I do.

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they’re looting, if you see a white family it says they’re looking for food.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.

Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

Remember, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

The just is close to the people’s heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can’t or won’t see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

We are all alike, on the inside.

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.

We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

If someone decides they’re not going to be happy, it’s not your problem. You don’t have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing into their self-pity.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.