Quotes by Humanitarians

I don't know who first said it, but this proverb is something I believe: A lion leading a lot of sheep can defeat a sheep leading many lions. The important part is that I must decide when I am a lion and when I must be a sheep. I don't believe you are always one or the other.
Yao Ming
Economy prudence and a simple life are the sure masters of need and will often accomplish that which their opposites with a fortune at hand will fail to do.
Clara Barton
Being black does not stop you. You can sit out in the world and say "Well white people kept me back and I can't do this." Not so. You can have anything you want if you make up your mind and you want it.
Clara McBride Hale
Everybody's business is nobody's business and nobody's business is my business.
Clara Barton
Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.
Jean Vanier
The door that nobody else will go in at seems always to swing open widely for me.
Clara Barton
Until I die I'm going to keep doing. My people need me. They need somebody that's not taking from them and is giving them something.
Clara McBride Hale
Envy comes from people's ignorance of or lack of belief in their own gifts.
Jean Vanier
The door that nobody else will go in at seems always to swing open widely for me.
Clara Barton
Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.
Jean Vanier
Until I die I'm going to keep doing. My people need me. They need somebody that's not taking from them and is giving them something.
Clara McBride Hale
Envy comes from people's ignorance of or lack of belief in their own gifts.
Jean Vanier
Do you want a world with . . . more joy and happiness? Then find your own joy and happiness and contribute to the joy and happiness of others.
Bo Lozoff
An institution or reform movement that is not selfish must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering or diminishing the sum of happiness. I suppose it is a philanthropic movement to try to reverse the process.
Clara Barton
I'm not an American hero. I'm a person who loves children.
Clara McBride Hale
For attractive lips speak words of kindness. For lovely eyes seek out the good in people. For a slim figure share your food with the hungry. For beautiful hair let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day. For poise walk with the knowledge you'll never walk alone.
Audrey Hepburn
I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who by all laws of logic should never have made it. At each stage of my career I lacked the experience.
Audrey Hepburn
I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things always have been done. ... I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind. I go for anything new that might improve the past.
Clara Barton
Keep trying. Take care of the small circle around you. When you have succeeded with them then move outwards one small step at a time.
Audrey Hepburn
I may be compelled to face danger but never fear it and while our soldiers can stand and fight I can stand and feed and nurse them.
Clara Barton
Nothing is impossible, the world it's self says I'm possible!
Audrey Hepburn
The complexity of a subject, if crucial for understanding the story, needs to be shown in the visualisation. Thus, in many cases, clarifying a subject requires increasing the amount of information, not reducing it.
Alberto Cairo
In a time when society is drowning in tsunamis of misinformation, it is possible to change the world for the better if we repeat the truth often and loud enough.
Alberto Cairo
Everything I learned I learned from the movies.
Audrey Hepburn
Everything I learned I learned from themovies.
Audrey Hepburn
Which is a greater sin in the eyes of God: to let a child suffer and die to preserve your reputation, or to become friends with your enemy?
Jeremy Courtney
It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict . . . There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex —everything to do with power. It is done to torture and humiliate innocent people and often very young children.
Angelina Jolie
You can always tell what kind of a person a man really thinks you are by the earrings he gives you.
Audrey Hepburn
You have to look at yourself objectively. Analyze yourself like an instrument. You have to be absolutely frank with yourself. Face your handicaps, don't try to hide them. Instead, develop something else.
Audrey Hepburn
Flowing from this union, source of a plenitude of joy, the love of the couple reveals itself through the daily acceptance of the limits and faults of each other and in mutual openness. It is this acceptance in and through gentleness, kindness, forgiveness, confidence and the desire to see shining in the other the warm light of the Spirit of God that becomes the great sign of the merciful love of God for man and His incessant forgiveness.
Jean Vanier
I am convinced that in the present time, in spite of the difficulties man has to meet another in a state of oblation, communion and gift of self, there are latent hidden forces in him which can be awakened in order to enable him to discover and live this reality of love and fidelity. In order to really penetrate into this mystery of the union of the couple, it is essential that each one acquire an interior maturity, a maturity that is perhaps rare. I would add that in order to be truly united and to remain truly faithful to one another, the couple must listen and be open to the Spirit of God who has reserved for Himself the science of the heart. The heart of man is satisfied only by the Infinite and to discover this Infinite in union he must open himself to the Spirit of God, a spirit of giving, of receiving. The union between the two spouses can thus deepen to such an extent that they enter in a mystical manner into the very life of God Himself.
Jean Vanier
If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.
Audrey Hepburn
The poor are always prophetic. As true prophets always point out, they reveal God's design. That is why we should take time to listen to them. And that means staying near them, because they speak quietly and infrequently; they are afraid to speak out, they lack confidence in themselves because they have been broken and oppressed. But if we listen to them, they will bring us back to the essential.
Jean Vanier
If I blow my nose, it gets written all over the world.
Audrey Hepburn
I have a motto that if something isn’t blatantly impossible, then there must be a way of doing it.
Sir Nicholas Winton
It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda's genocide described as a product of "ancient tribal hatreds." I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people.
Paul Rusesabagina
I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence stillborn there. To understand this you have to become this.
Kenneth Cain
I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it is the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills.
Audrey Hepburn
I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it's the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It's probably the most important thing in a person.
Audrey Hepburn
Meanwhile she's coldly interrogating me with her eyes. She's definitely in charge of this house and this moment. This must be Chloe.She escorts me to a table full of people and presents me. She introduces them briefly. This one's from Morocco, that one from Italy, he's Persian--I'm not exactly sure what that means--this one's from "the UK." They're all in their twenties, poised and dismissive. They don't know or care who I'm supposed to be at home or where I went to school. They're measuring something else I can't see and don't understand.They nod and turn back to each other. They seem to be waiting for a cue from Chloe to release them from having to feign interest. She introduces herself at substantially more length. Her father is Chinese and her mother is Swiss; she grew up in Hong Kong and "in Europe."I grew up in Michigan and in Michigan. But she didn't ask.
Kenneth Cain
True beauty in a woman is reflected in the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows.
Audrey Hepburn
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one for helping yourself and one for helping others
Audrey Hepburn
I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?
Kenneth Cain
And the beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows!
Audrey Hepburn
In community we are called to care for each member of the community. We can. Choose our friends but we do not choose our brothers and sisters' they are given to us, whether in family or in community." Jean
Jean Vanier
Those who are weak have great difficulty finding their place in our society. The image of the ideal human as powerful and capable disenfranchises the old, the sick, the less-abled. For me, society must, by definition, be inclusive of the needs and gifts of all its members. How can we lay claim to making an open and friendly society where human rights are respected and fostered when, by the values we teach and foster, we systematically exclude segments of our population? I believe that those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us. When we do include them, they add richly to our lives and add immensely to our world.
Jean Vanier
Community is not an ideal; it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we want them to be.
Jean Vanier
Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don't need a lot of money to be happy--in fact, the opposite.
Jean Vanier
One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.
Jean Vanier
We are not called by God to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.
Jean Vanier
It's sad if people think that's (homemaking) a dull existance, [but] you can't just buy an apartment and furnish it and walk away. It's the flowers you choose, the music you play, the smile you have waiting. I want it to be gay and cheerful, a haven in this troubled world. I don't want my husband and children to come home and find a rattled woman. Our era is already rattled enough, isn't it?
Audrey Hepburn
Anything that feels good couldn't possibly be bad.
Angelina Jolie
There are sufficient resources in the world for the needs of everybody, but not enough for the greed of even a significant minority.
Millard Fuller
Today that legend is inscribed on the stones that were used to build the walls of the school, and as the water falls out of the sky and over those stones, the words of the legend are carried down from the mountains and into the fields and gardens and orchards of Afghanistan. And as the water and the words rush past, who can fail to turn to his neighbor and whisper, with humility and awe-if this is what the weakest, the least valued, the most neglected among us are capable of achieving, truly is there anything we cannot do?
Greg Mortenson
I can never get used to not having you around Nanay. I travel the world but I can't find anybody like you!
H.H. Princess Raden Dato'Seri Maria Amor Torres
My mother is the one true hero of my life
H.H. Princess Raden Dato'Seri Maria Amor Torres
An ethics of desire is good news for those of us who have become allergic to an ethics of law.
Jean Vanier
Sometimes, it is not you who finds good ideas when you are seeking them. Instead, good ideas find you in the most unexpected circumstances.
Alberto Cairo
It is in the combination of words and visuals that the magic of understanding often happens.
Alberto Cairo
When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers, I kind of wanted to be a vampire.
Angelina Jolie