If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

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.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

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

I hate letting my teammates down. I know I’m not going to make every shot. Sometimes I try to make the right play, and if it results in a loss, I feel awful. I don’t feel awful because I have to answer questions about it. I feel awful in that locker room because I could have done something more to help my teammates win.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

When you’re in prison, you want to know that you were thought about.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

What I have in common with the character in ‚Truman‘ is this incredible need to please people. 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.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.

I have a scheme for stopping war. It’s this – no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.

I’m a people pleaser. I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do not know as an absolute stranger.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

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.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

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.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

You must show the world that you abhor fighting.

I think ‚Dirty Harry‘ was probably sensitive toward the victims of violent crime.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.