
August 15, 2015 http://www.wnd.com/wnd_video/farrakhan-retaliation-we-must-rise-up-and-kill-those-who-kill-us/ (15 August 2015)
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Testimony (1979)
August 15, 2015 http://www.wnd.com/wnd_video/farrakhan-retaliation-we-must-rise-up-and-kill-those-who-kill-us/ (15 August 2015)
“If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?”
Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), p. 115
Source: Darkness Visible (1990), III
Context: This general unawareness of what depression is really like was apparent most recently in the matter of Primo Levi, the remarkable Italian writer and survivor of Auschwitz who, at the age of sixty-seven, hurled himself down a stairwell in Turin in 1987. Since my own involvement with the illness, I had been more than ordinarily interested in Levi’s death, and so, late in 1988, when I read an account in The New York Times about a symposium on the writer and his work held at New York University, I was fascinated but, finally, appalled. For, according to the article, many of the participants, worldly writers and scholars, seemed mystified by Levi’s suicide, mystified and disappointed. It was as if this man whom they had all so greatly admired, and who had endured so much at the hands of the Nazis — a man of exemplary resilience and courage — had by his suicide demonstrated a frailty, a crumbling of character they were loath to accept. In the face of a terrible absolute — self-destruction — their reaction was helplessness and (the reader could not avoid it) a touch of shame.
My annoyance over all this was so intense that I was prompted to write a short piece for the op-ed page of the Times. The argument I put forth was fairly straightforward: the pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. Through the healing process of time — and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases — most people survive depression, which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.
Commenting on the NATO bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces, during an interview for the Death of Yugoslavia documentary, 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW4KU4FQ8qo
1990s
In a brief statement (4 January 2005), upon donating one million dollars to the relief efforts of the American Red Cross http://www.redcross.org/ in response to the tsunamis at the end of 2004. This was her second million dollar gift to the American Red Cross; she had also donated a million dollars after the terrorists attacks of September 11th, 2001.
Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4–5
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
Context: Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
" Morals, Reason and Animals: Steve Sapontzis Interviewed by Claudette Vaughan https://web.archive.org/web/20100114161007/http:/www.abolitionist-online.com/08_steve_sapontzis.shtml", Abolitionist Online (2009)
Source: Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (1999), p. 129