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

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‚studies‘ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‚studies‘ are about propaganda rather than serious education.

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

America isn’t Congress. America isn’t Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

The knowledge that we have brother scouts working in the same uniform, to the same ends, in the same way, in all corners of the Empire, cannot but make scouts proud of their brotherhood, and cannot fail to bring them into closer sympathy.

America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus‘ famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

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.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom and peace. But in the face of United States aggression they have risen up, united as one man.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

I think there’s more women that watch me than men, but I don’t look at myself as just a minister to women. My ministry began that way, but I really feel like the Word of God is for everybody.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

We boil at different degrees.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood – never.

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species.

My readers – and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

Whether a person is straight or gay, Republican, Democrat, good person, not a good person, they’re all welcome, because to me, church is a place you’re supposed to get healed and whole and loved.

If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen.

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

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Being beautiful is not so fun when you’re in a business with all men.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Never find fault with the absent.

The American people are so much stronger, so much more resolved than any enemy can fully understand.

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

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

We are all alike, on the inside.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

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.

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

It’s very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

North Americans don’t understand… that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.