Because of empathy, we care more for, and devote far more resources to, someone who is familiar, from our country or our group, than a stranger.

Families survive the terrible twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons.

Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.

Our best hope for the future [...] lies in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

A religion such as Judaism or Catholicism might survive even if it comes to reject a literal account of God creating man and animals. But it cannot survive the rejection of an immaterial soul.

I argue that we should be kind, we should be compassionate, and we should definitely be reasonable and rational, but that empathy leads us astray.

The fact that something can be used for good isn't necessarily a knockdown argument for it.

Empathy zooms you in on an individual and, as a result, it's narrow, it's innumerate, it's racist, it's very biased.

The effects of Twitter and Facebook and all those things on people's psychologies is a really interesting question to which nobody knows the answer.

I love teaching. I wouldn't take a job that didn't include it.

What I mean by "empathy" is putting yourself in other people's shoes, feeling what they feel.

In a Consciously Conscious Revolutionary Workplace, its People First, Planet Second and then Profits.

I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy.

It's so important to take vitamins. People always get ill on tour because of the close proximity in the bus with everyone.

When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority.

A forty and a blunt, that's all she really wants.

And still the Void is still and'll never move - But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.

Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence against the innocent.

Christ didn't die just so you could make to heaven; He lives so you can make it through earth!

When you can despise death, you have conquered all fears.

I've always been attracted to independent women, but the idea that someone could be independent and still kind of put herself second at times was pretty interesting.