It is impudent in the extreme for this man to go around Europe haranguing people on their duties to civilization when his own country presents one of the most lawless aspects of modern life the whole world affords.
Roger Casement
Irish Human Rights Champion
commenting on Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 Guildhall
speech telling Great Britain to either rule Egypt or get out.
At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage and the most savage must weep. A Turk pointed to the graves -that’s politics, he said . Then he pointed to the dead bodies — that’s diplomacy. God pity all us poor soldiers.
Major Aubry Herbert
About a truce during the battles on Gallipoli for Turks and British to bury the thousands who had died between the trenches.
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike
As if we had them not.
Measure for Measure
Willy S; 1604
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Mark Twain, author and humorist
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. … That’s why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim’s side, so as to reduce the damage to done. Among them I can at least try to discover how one attains the third category, in other words, to peace.”
Jean Tarrou to Dr. Bernard Rieux
The Plague, Albert Camus
Avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
George Washington, 1st US president, general (1732-1799)
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these. -George Washington Carver, scientist (1864-1943)
…all men work more zealously against their enemies than they coöperate with their friends…
Cassius Dio
On Julius Caesar in
Roman History
Book 37
The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.
-William Hazlitt, essayist
(1778-1830)
I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals…
Jonathan Swift
To Alexander Pope,
Sept 29, 1725
Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth.
Liu Xiaobo
Nobel Peace Prize, 2010
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Bertrand Russell
Autobiography
