We need a little more compassion, and if we cannot have it, then no politician or even a magician can save the planet.
All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hand to left or right, An emptiness above-- Know that you aren't alone. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all your years.
A question I would like to present to the world is: Where is the love? And what are we doing? Who's making the decisions that are putting us in the predicaments that we are in, with all of these people losing their lives around the world in so many different ways?
While it's easy for South Sudan to feel distant, the situation is all too real for the South Sudanese mothers choosing which child gets to eat tomorrow. This is a time when we must look outward together and declare that humanity has no borders - no one deserves to suffer like this, especially in a world of such abundance.
As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.
All human suffering concerns each human being.
Compassion becomes an automatic reaction when you see all of humanity as one undivided and indivisible family.
True compassion is universal in scope. It is accompanied by a feeling of responsibility.
The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare.
The world, more suffering than sinning, turns toward Pope Francis as in a conversation people turn to the person who is making sense of things.
My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the whole earth. I have look'd for equals and lovers an found them ready for me in all lands, I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them
Always be capable of feeling … any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world.
As long as there are people suffering, how can I not be happy?
Man is one; and he hath one great heart. It is thus we feel, with a gigantic throb athwart the sea, each other's rights and wrongs; thus are we men.
I think our music is more about seeing ourselves in each other and trying to find a more humanistic viewpoint for the world.
Dorothy Day said - and I'm sure that Kathy Kelly would say the same thing - 'I'm working toward a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.' Now, think about that: a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.
If there is one person on the planet who still is suffering from loneliness and from pain or despair, and we don't know about it, or we don't want to know about it, then something is wrong with the world.
We must recognize that the suffering of one person or one nation is the suffering of humanity.
Be more loving, compassionate and understanding with ourselves, with others, and with the planet, because we are all connected. We are one.
Our best hope for the future [...] lies in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.
Bob Geldof feels the big picture all the time, even in the smallest argument when someone's saying, 'Well, no, you've got to have three staples in the program, not just two,' Bob feels people dying somewhere.
The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.
I think we're going to care more about Americans than Africans. I don't think that's ever going to go away, and I don't think it's ever going to go away that people care more about their families than strangers, and their communities over other communities. But I think it would transform the world in such a good way if we could just acknowledge, at least intellectually, that an African life and an American life are the same.
It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts. . . . Humanity. . . is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?
I don't think I'm yet peaceful because I have to struggle every day within myself when I see the suffering of the people of the world, the women and the children. And fury sets in. But I have to transform that and take it out and do something positive with it - but I have to do that sometimes minute to minute.
