A Quote by Robert Green Ingersoll

What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy. — © Robert Green Ingersoll
What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy.
I respect animals. I have more sympathy for an injured or dead animal than I do for an injured or dead human being, because human beings participate and cooperate in their own undoing. Animals are completely innocent. There are no innocent human beings.
We often do more good by our sympathy than by our labors. A man may lose position, influence, wealth, and even health, and yet live on in comfort, if with resignation; but there is one thing without which life becomes a burden--that is human sympathy.
The intelligence displayed by many dumb animals approaches so closely to human intelligence that it is a mystery. The animals see and hear and love and fear and suffer. They use their organs far more faithfully than many human beings use theirs. They manifest sympathy and tenderness toward their companions in suffering. Many animals show an affection for those who have charge of them, far superior to the affection shown by some of the human race. They form attachments for man which are not broken without great suffering to them.
I gave you sympathy. *I* want sympathy!" "Are you kidding me? You have the sexiest man on the planet wanting you. You're getting laid regularly. No sympathy for you!
Where human life needs most sympathy, where usually it is the most barren, there it is that Christ is more likely to be found than anywhere else.
We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy.
It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
Many times I am asked why the suffering of animals should call forth more sympathy from me than the suffering of human beings; why I work in this direction of charitable work more than toward any other. My answer is that because I believe that this work includes all the education and lines of reform which are needed to make a perfect circle of peace and goodwill about the Earth.
Any sympathy won for Aileen Wuornos based on a lie is not sympathy at all. The question is, can we have sympathy for the circumstances of someone's life? That's what I was interested in.
For the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.
Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.
Sympathy has to be the first and foremost thing in one's life, sympathy and the feeling of oneness. There cannot be anything greater than the feeling of oneness .
If sympathy is all that human beings need, then the Cross of Christ is an absurdity and there is absolutely no need for it. What the world needs is not "a little bit of love," but major surgery. If you think you are helping lost people with your sympathy and understanding, you are a traitor to Jesus Christ. You must have a right-standing relationship with Him yourself, and pour your life out in helping others in His way— not in a human way that ignores God.
What distinguishes us humans from animals is our conscience. Once our conscience is gone we lose our humanness. Without conscience, humans can be far more dangerous than beasts. Beasts kill for food, humans kill for ideology. Beasts kill just enough to eat. Humans can kill endlessly.
Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.
Maybe poets express more directly a sense of sympathy for other human beings. Painting is a little bit more of a retreat from human beings in real life; painting is more about the extreme moments when speech doesn't help anymore.
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