We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

This line comes from Charlie Chaplin’s climactic speech in the film The Great Dictator (1940), delivered by the Jewish barber who has been mistaken for the fascist dictator Adenoid Hynkel. Released as Europe was at war and before the U.S. entered World War II, the film was Chaplin’s first full sound feature and a direct satire of Hitler and Mussolini. The speech abandons comedy for an earnest appeal to common humanity, urging solidarity over hatred, greed, and authoritarianism. Chaplin later noted the risks and controversy of making such an explicit anti-fascist statement at the time.

Chaplin frames compassion as a basic human instinct—people naturally seek mutual flourishing rather than mutual suffering. The contrast between “happiness” and “misery” rejects political systems that thrive on scapegoating, cruelty, or division, and it insists that ethical life is relational: we “live by” one another’s well-being. Spoken in a moment of mistaken identity, the line also implies that ordinary individuals can—and must—speak against dehumanization. Its enduring power lies in its simplicity: it treats empathy not as a lofty ideal but as a shared, practical foundation for social and political life.