Daily Inspiration Quote by Susan George

Suffering is often treated like political currency: pile up enough of it and the world will finally pay attention. Susan George refuses that sentimental math. The line is a hard corrective to the feel-good idea that pain automatically produces progress, that history bends out of pity. Her intent is disciplinary: to redirect moral outrage away from spectatorship and toward infrastructure.

The subtext is an accusation aimed as much at comfortable bystanders as at power. If misery alone changed systems, the poor would have won centuries ago. George is pushing against the media logic of the “crisis moment,” where images of famine, war, or austerity circulate, trigger a brief flare of empathy, then dissipate without altering the machinery that caused them. Suffering becomes content; compassion becomes a substitute for strategy.

“Only organisation” is the deliberately unglamorous punchline. Not awareness. Not tears. Not individual virtue. Organisation means unions, coalitions, disciplined campaigns, institutions that can outlast a news cycle and force concessions through leverage. It’s also a warning to movements that mistake visibility for power: hashtags don’t negotiate; membership does.

Contextually, George’s career in global justice activism sits in the long shadow of repeated humanitarian catastrophes met with charity rather than structural change. Her quote reads like an organizer’s field note after watching moral concern get absorbed by the status quo. The rhetorical power comes from its refusal to flatter the listener. It denies redemption-through-suffering and insists on a more bracing truth: change isn’t granted by the powerful when they’re moved; it’s taken when people are coordinated.