By “empathy,” some people mean everything that is good - compassion, kindness, warmth, love, being a mensch, changing the world - and I'm for all of those things. I'm not a monster.

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.

It is by giving the freedom to the other, that is by letting go, we gain our own freedom back.

Good writing demands self-discipline and constant learning

Confusion is a weapon that is used by others to gain a temporary objective or advantage.

I realized, there are people out there who can beat me, want to beat me. And unless I continue to innovate and evolve, I am going to learn a painful lesson from someone who has.

When I think of you, and you are not there, I see you in my mind's eye always with a book in your hand.

Already I notice a feeling of 'If this be sociology, Good Lord deliver us.' However sociology has endured many things like it and my faith in its ultimate triumph never wavers.

A "communist/socialist/progressive" is an oxymoron, like an "atheist/evangelical Christian/Muslim."

I supply the music for Vampires, which is a new series that's coming out.

In Africa, the woman was co-equal. In Europe, the woman was a vassal. To some extent, she still is.