Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.
Howard ZinnRead
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Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.
The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off - we do not have to stand for this.
When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.
Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.
What kind of world does the humanitarian contemplate as affording him full scope? It could only be a world filled with breadlines and hospitals, in which nobody retained the natural power of a human being to help himself or to resist having things done to him. And that is precisely the world that the humanitarian arranges when he gets his way.
If something's not impossible, there must be a way of doing it.
It has been said that the people of this country are deeply interested in the humanitarian and philanthropic considerations involved in [the Eastern Question]. All must appreciate such feelings. But I am mistaken if there be not a yet deeper sentiment on the part of the people of this country, one with which I cannot doubt your lordships will ever sympathise, and that is - the determination to maintain the Empire of England.
Taking care of children has nothing to do with politics. I think perhaps with time, instead of there being a politicisation of humanitarian aid, there will be a humanisation of politics.
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.
On the whole, my family had always adopted a reserved attitude toward Zionism; my great-uncle Edmond had acted on his own in generously supporting Jewish Palestine, for reasons more humanitarian and religious than political. But the devastation caused by the war and the extermination of six million Jews radically changed all of our former attitudes. The idea of a Jewish homeland acquired an intense emotional appeal; I myself became an ardent Zionist.
From the Balkans to Africa, from Asia to the Middle East, we have witnessed the weakening or absence of effective governance leading to the ravaging of human rights and the abandonment of longstanding humanitarian principles. We need competent and responsible states to meet the needs of "we the peoples" for whom the UN was created. And the world's peoples will not be fully served unless peace, development and human rights, the three pillars of the UN, are advanced together with equal vigour.
Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love...the smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.
Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.
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