Non Harming Quotes & Sayings

Central to Mill's approach throughout On Liberty is his 'Harm Principle', the idea that individual adults should be free to do whatever they wish up to the point where they harm another person in the process. Mill's principle is apparently straightforward: the only justification for interference with someone's freedom to live their life as they choose is if they risk harming other people. — Nigel Warburton

The superb use the mind as mirror, not welcoming nor rejecting, reflect without hiding, and triumph without harming. (Chuang Tzu) — Sung Yee Poon

Acts of psychological abuse include berating or humiliating the victim; interrogating the victim; restricting the victim's ability to come and go freely; obstructing the victim's access to assistance (e.g., law enforcement; legal, protective, or medical resources); threatening the victim with physical harm or sexual assault; harming, or threatening to harm, people or things that the victim cares about; unwarranted restriction of the victim's access to or use of economic resources; isolating the victim from family, friends, or social support resources; stalking the victim; and trying to make the victim think that he or she is crazy. — Donald W. Black

One of the things that strikes me most though is how some people don't realise they're self-harming. The phrase 'self-harm' brings up thoughts of 'cutting', but that's only a small portion of it. When you drink excessively to drown your sorrows to the point you throw up and can't see straight and/or, like a girl at my school, ended up being driven to hospital to have her stomach pumped, you've brought harm to yourself. If you take drugs to feel numb and it becomes an addiction that you can't break, you've self-harmed. When you starve yourself or binge eat to fit the latest fashions, you're pushing your body further than it can go.
We need to start treating ourselves how we deserve to be treated, even if you feel that no one else does. Prove to the world you ARE worth something by treating yourself with the utmost respect and hope that other people will follow your example. And even if they don't, at least one person in the world is treating you well: YOU. — Carrie Hope Fletcher

Without harming anyone, how can I make this world more peaceful? How can I help others to fulfill their desires? How can I enhance and enrich the beauty and happiness for humanity? — Debasish Mridha

Every action that you take - that your disorder tells you to take - is self-harming in the short and long term. — Priyavrat Thareja

I know this is more than I need, and that I'm harming myself by having it, but I love the pleasure of this experience more than I love the pleasure of doing what pleases the Lord, so I'm just going to go ahead and satiate myself
(iuJ/iua/ingq — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally. — Sam Harris

You are the one who takes the peace away from yourself. You are the one who's harming yourself. — Sandra Harner

If I had the capacity to withstand instantaneous physical pain, I think I would have even considered taking a razor to my leg. Because after so long of living in that hole, I would have rather felt pain than nothing at all; I just wanted to feel something again. You reach a milestone in such illnesses when denial lifts and you realize that the things you do are truly damaging both to yourself and to others. By then, however, you learn to not care and you embrace the notion that this method of self-harming is both deserved and satisfying. — Leanne Waters

Never shall I truly understand the human race. What do they seek to prove by their eternal battling? What glory do they find in harming a fellow being? Or, as I sometimes suspect, have I been condemned to a world where madness reigns?" -- the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four #55, by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Joe Sinnott, Sammy Rosen, and Irving Forbush. — Mark Boss

The idea that you have to drop any thing that you might be interested in doing because you have to pass that test tomorrow and it's something that you're not interested in, that's just the opposite of education. It's also harming teaching, because the teachers are evaluated by the results of the test. — Noam Chomsky

Either harming other people is wrong, in which case God is unnecessary, or harming other people is acceptable, in which case God's admonitions are misguided. — Greg Graffin

The industrial way we fish for seafood is harming the marine habitats that all ocean life depends upon. Indiscriminate commercial fishing practices that include miles of driftnets, long lines with thousands of lethal hooks and bottom trawls are ruining ocean ecosystems by killing non-seafood species, including sea turtles and marine mammals. — Ted Danson

We have to stop harming children in child care. I'm trying to make us stop. I wouldn't know what to do otherwise. — Edward Zigler

If we can manage to refrain from harming others in our everyday actions and words, we can start to give more serious attention to actively doing good, and this can be a source of great joy and inner confidence. We can benefit others through our actions by being warm and generous toward them, by being charitable, and by helping those in need. — Dalai Lama

Please put the ladybug outside without harming her. (to his butler) — Winston Churchill

As a bee without harming the flower, its colour or scent, flies away, collecting only the honey, even so should the sage wander in the village. — Gautama Buddha

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help?
However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder
in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes. — Thomas Szasz

For these creatures(humans) are for the most part malevolent and murderous by nature, able to tolerate others only insofar as they resemble themselves, capable of slaughtering each other because of a slight difference in skin colour or appearance. Also, they cannot tolerate those who do not think as they do. Although they know perfectly well, theoretically, that the surface of the inhabited globe is divided into thousands of areas each with it system of religious or scientific belief, and although they know that it is entirely by chance that any individual among them was born into this area or that area, this or that area of belief, this theoretical knowledge does not prevent them from hating foreigners in their own particular small area, and if not harming them, isolating them in every way possible. — Doris Lessing

Sociologists well understand that chaos at home causes violent behavior, educational failure and social alienation among children. Yet, many of us in America stay far, far away from this topic. That in itself is a national scandal. Bad parenting is gravely harming this nation. — Bill O'Reilly

One man encompasses all of humanity. Harming one man is harming humanity — Bangambiki Habyarimana

If each one of us does our bit, we will be helping to keep global warming from harming our countries. — Sienna Miller

The commitment to morality, or non-harming, is a source of tremendous strength, because it helps free the mind from the remorse of having done unwholesome actions. Freedom from remorse leads to happiness. Happiness leads to concentration. Concentration brings wisdom. And wisdom is the source of peace and freedom in our lives. — Joseph Goldstein

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages. — Thomas A. Edison

The War on Drugs has failed, but it's worse than that. It is actively harming our society. Violent crime is thriving in the shadows to which the drug trade has been consigned. People who genuinely need help can't get it. Neither can people who need medical marijuana to treat terrible diseases. We are spending billions, filling up our prisons with non-violent offenders and sacrificing our liberties. — Sting

Accepting who we are is a practice of non-harming. Sadly, much self-help literature contains seeds of harm: We are urged to remake ourselves into someone who will be spiritually or psychologically acceptable, and that acceptance is conditional on our performance in the areas of therapy, growth, or meditation. We are still not accepting ourselves unconditionally, just as we are in this moment, with a full and joyful heart. A more merciful practice begins with acceptance. It begins with the assumption that we were never broken, never defective. By surrendering into a deep acceptance of our own nature - rather than by tearing apart who we are - we actually make more room for genuine, rich, merciful, playful growth and change. If we feel our fundamental strength, creativity, and wisdom, then change is not frightening at all. Things simply fall away when they are ready, making room for the rich harvest underneath. — Wayne Muller

Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren't too embarrassed by the sound of your voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stumbling is a sentence that needs to be reworked to make it smoother and more fluent. A poet once told me that he was reading a draft of a new poem aloud to himself when a thief broke into his Manhattan loft. Instantly surmising that he had entered the dwelling of a madman, the thief turned and ran without taking anything, and without harming the poet. So it maybe that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process. — Francine Prose

Could an enemy really curse someone? Could the enemy affect reality by the deliberate mental intent of harming? — M.J. Mandoki

Across practices, across cultures, and throughout historical periods, when people support and engage in violence, their primary motivations are moral. By 'moral', I mean that people are violent because they feel they must be; because they feel that their violence is obligatory. They know that they are harming fully human beings. Nonetheless, they believe they should. Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations. — Anonymous

He's only harming himself who's bent upon harming another — Hesiod

Agape means recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process, and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Adam knew it was childish, but he rationalized it in this way: carelessly harming other people was a decent stand-in for baseline human interaction. — Warren Ellis

You may think you are harming others and some of you take pleasure in this, but in reality you are harming yourself hundreds of times more than you have harmed anyone else. — Khorshed Bhavnagri

Lay aside life-harming heaviness, And entertain a cheerful disposition. — William Shakespeare

... by treating nature as exterior and inferior to humans we saw no harm to ourselves in polluting the soil, the plants, the air and the water. We did not notice the effect of our pollution on whatever walked over it, ran across it, climbed up it, flew through it, or swam in it.

Now we notice that harming other constituents of our planetary system brings harm to ourselves. — Betty Jean Craige

THE TRUTH OF THE VERY SMALL
When he is born, a baby's head is filled with the knowledge of space. The circumference of his skull is as infinite as the twirlings of the universe. His eyes look out with the blur of eyes which see for all species. He has remembered his own nature from past patterns. Now his heart beats through rock, sky, oceans. He feels the silence and the sound all around the world beneath his skin.
We all hold somewhere deep within us the truth we accepted in innocence. The seas, the forests, the soil, the atmosphere, are all vital parts of an ongoing system. By harming any part of it we must ultimately harm ourselves. It is that simple. — Jay Woodman

As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. — Joel Bakan

In 2009 I was sitting about thirty feet away from Barack Obama at the launch of Desoto Solar as he announced massive funding for the "Smart Grid". I had no idea that I would later become a victim of the "Smart Grid". Yes, they knew in 2009 that these devices were harming people and continued to fund the program. — Steven Magee

Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons — Milton Friedman

And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure - if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually like you - that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself. — Alexander Masters

Directors of a large food-manufacturing firm ( ... At one extreme (: one) said it was not his job to protect people from themselves; he was not forcing people to eat his products, and if they chose to do so at the risk of harming themselves, it was of their own free choice. — John Yudkin

Taking significant amounts of carbon out of our economy without harming its vibrancy is exactly the sort of challenge at which California excels. — Jerry Brown

You are worth more than harming yourself — Demi Lovato

The Nuffield report suggests that there is a moral imperative for investment into GM crop research in developing countries. But the moral imperative is in fact the opposite. The policy of drawing of funds away from low-cost sustainable agriculture research, towards hi-tech, exclusive, expensive and unsafe technology is itself ethically questionable. There is a strong moral argument that the funding of GM technology in agriculture is harming the long-term sustainability of agriculture in the developing world. — Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher

You should never have a power, in any area, with the purpose of harming someone. — Helio Gracie