Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat.

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

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

Every time I see documentaries or infomercials about little kids with cancer, I just freak out. It affects me on the highest emotional level… Anytime I think about it, it makes me sadder than anything I can think of.

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.

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.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Whenever our neighbour’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

If you are not being bullied all I would say – cause I like to talk about the other side of it as well – is you know, be someone that nurtures, and if there’s someone in your class that maybe doesn’t have a lot of friends, be the person that sits with them in the cafeteria sometimes; be the bigger person.

Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.

Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse.

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.

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.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Instead of judging people, we need to pray.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

A good thing to remember is somebody’s got it a lot worse than we do.

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

What’s so beautiful about Miami is that we support each other. We’re just one big family, not just the entertainers, just everyone in general.

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

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

Ethiopia didn’t just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, ‚Would you take my son with you?‘ He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

We learn martial arts as helping weakness. You never fight for people to get hurt. You’re always helping people.

I have much more support than most women around this world, and I have the financial means to have a home and help with care and food.

When people need love and understanding and support the most is when they deserve it the least.

I’m a writer. I don’t support any war. That’s my principle.

When you have enough understanding and compassion in you, then that amount of understanding and compassion will try to express itself in action. And your practice should help you to cultivate more understanding and compassion.

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

God’s dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

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.

People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you’ll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.

Every loss of life is terrible.

There are techniques of Buddhism, such as meditation, that anyone can adopt. And, of course, there are Christian monks and nuns who already use Buddhist methods in order to develop their devotion, compassion, and ability to forgive.

Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

A real Christian is a person who can give his pet parrot to the town gossip.

But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people, and do our best to help them find their own grace. That’s what I strive to do, that’s what I pray to do every day.

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

It’s amazing if you just listen to people. They tell you all the time things that you can do for them, without even realizing what they’re doing. I’ve learned to take notice of those things and if it’s something that I feel God wants me to do, then I try to do that to add joy to their life.

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows – pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music… That would be so much cheaper than bombs.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Something’s very wrong with a nation that would rather spend money on war than take care of its children.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

You pity the fool because you don’t want to beat up a fool! You know, pity is between sorry and mercy. See, if you pity him, you know, you won’t have to beat him up. So that’s why I say fools, you gotta give another chance because they don’t know no better. That’s why I pity them!

We care for each other and care about our family, and we are both working towards the same goal.

When I was young, many people worked for a company with a pension plan that covered them for as long as they lived. If they didn’t have a pension plan, they could count on Social Security and Medicare.