“After all, sympathy is genius. A man who really sympathizes with another understands him. A man who sympathizes with a religion, instantly sees the good that is in it, and the man who sympathizes with the right, sees the evil that a creed contains.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

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Robert G. Ingersoll 439

Union United States Army officer 1833–1899

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

“I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! … I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits [referring to infants] make lice!”

John Chivington (1821–1894) former Methodist pastor and colonel in the United States Volunteers

Brown, Dee (2001) [1970]. "War Comes to the Cheyenne". Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Macmillian. pp. 86–87.

“A man who works evil against another works it really against himself, and bad advice is worst for the one who devised it”

Hesiod book Works and Days

Source: Works and Days

“My fifth principle is…to acknowledge the equal rights of all nations. You may sympathize with one nation more than another. Nay, you must sympathize in certain circumstances with one nation more than another. You sympathize most with those nations, as a rule, with which you have the closest connection in language, in blood, and in religion, or whose circumstances at the time seem to give the strongest claim to sympathy. But in point of right all are equal, and you have no right to set up a system under which one of them is to be placed under moral suspicion or espionage, or to be made the constant subject of invective. If you do that, but especially if you claim for yourself a superiority, a pharisaical superiority over the whole of them, then I say you may talk about your patriotism if you please, but you are a misjudging friend of your country, and in undermining the basis of the esteem and respect of other people for your country you are in reality inflicting the severest injury upon it.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in West Calder, Scotland (27 November 1879), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879 (Leicester University Press, 1971), pp. 116-117.
1870s

“The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Lectures to Young Men: On Various Important Subjects (1856) Lecture IV : Portrait Gallery
Miscellany
Context: The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes — openly bad and secretly bad.

“I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

“The Crooked Wood” p. 208
The Journey Home (1977)

“Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.”

Charles Stross book Halting State

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 33, “Elaine: Gentlemen and Players” (p. 275)

“The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Universities, Actual and Ideal (1874)
1870s

“We should fully understand our religion. Fighting is a part of our religion and our Shari'a. Those who love God and his Prophet and this religion cannot deny that. Whoever denies even a minor tenet of our religion commits the gravest sin in Islam. Those who sympathize with the infidels-such as the PLO in Palestine or the so-called Palestinian Authority--have been trying for tens of years to get back some of their rights. They laid down arms and abandoned what is called violence and tried peaceful bargaining. What did the Jews give them? They did not give them even 1% of their rights.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

In response to the interviewer stating: 'But there are many Muslims who do not agree with your kind of violence.'
1990s, Time magazine interview (1998)

“After all, sympathy is genius. A man who really sympathizes with another understands him. A man who sympathizes with a religion, instantly sees the good that is in it, and the man who sympathizes with the right, sees the evil that a creed contains.”

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Robert G. Ingersoll 439

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