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Admit it. That voice inside your head is often your most scathing critic.

If Charles Darwin and the Dalai Lama could chat, they would agree on why humans are compassionate, psychologist Paul Eckman says. "We are compelled to relieve the sufferings of another, in order that our own painful feelings may be at the same time relieved," Darwin wrote.

The Dalai Lama says "the seed of compassion" is the discomfort we experience when we see someone suffering. "We are thus impelled to relieve the suffering of another so that our own painful suffering may be relieved."

By Rita Hibbard

Compassion can take many different forms, but at its root it involves understanding the suffering of others and taking steps to alleviate it.

Read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (click here for information and purchase)

Thucydides | Pericles' Funeral Oration: Democracy Then and Now

Margaret Postgate Cole: The Veteran

Margaret Cole (nee Postgate) was a pacifist in the First World War and an active supporter of the Second World War. She was a lifelong socialist and active in education reform in England.

Fatena Al-Gharra: Movements

by Tom Williams

Tom Williams and son at the “I Have a Dream” marker

Editor’s note: This is the text of a presentation made at the Louisville Intergovernmental Black History Committee in Louisville, Kentucky USA on January 13, 2004 by attorney Tom Williams. Tom’s comments illustrate the evolution of the response to hatred toward a more compassionate and workable form of engagement.

Read more of Shulklapper’s poetry (click here for information and purchase)

Read Bachmann’s War Diary (click here for information and purchase)