“Everybody’s supposed to have sympathy for the white male, but when you show empathy to anyone else, suddenly empathy is a sin.”  --Karen Swallow Prior, Christian scholar

"Monumental history deceives with analogies: with tempting similarities the courageous are enticed to rashness, the enthusiastic to fanaticism; and if one thinks of this history as being in the hands and heads of talented egoists and enraptured rascals then empires are destroyed, princes murdered, wars and revolutions instigated and the number of historical “effects in themselves,” that is, of effects without sufficient causes, is further increased."  --Friedrich Nietzsche

"To take pity on people in distress is a human quality which every man and woman should possess, but it is especially requisite in those who have once needed comfort, and found it in others."  --Boccacio, The Decameron 

“If St. Francis of Assisi could meet the Sultan during the Crusades, then surely today’s leaders can sit down and talk.”  --Jeffrey Sachs

"In our ancient Russian land every Orthodox knows that whoever has read the Bible all the way through and has “even got to Christ,” can no longer be held strictly responsible for his actions, [for] such people are like the well known fools of God."  --Nikolai Leskov

"The  saints  confute  the  logicians,  but  they  do  not  confute  them  by  logic  but  by  sanctity.    They  do  not  prove  the  real  connection  between  the  religious  symbols  and  the  everyday  realities  by  logical  demonstration,  but  by  life.    Solvitur  ambulando,  said  someone  about  Zeno’s  paradox,  which  proves  the  impossibility  of  physical  motion.    It  is  solved  by  walking.    Solvitur immolando, says the saint, about the paradox of the logicians.  It is solved by sacrifice."  --Austin Farrer 

"Set wide the window. Let me drink the day."  --Edith Wharton

[The Mexican-American War was] "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory."  --Ulysses S. Grant.

"Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult."  --George Eliot