Even the charities I give to are related to things that touch my life, like the Special Olympics. I'm not fully rational; I'm swayed by my biases and my emotions.

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.

Fill life with joy.

It is not the success but the failures that glorify success.

There's a strange something, which without a brain Fools feel, and which e'en wise men can't explain, Planted in man, to bind him to that earth, In dearest ties, from whence he drew his birth.

A father’s duty is to make his home a place of happiness and joy.

New York means so much to people. If you're inclined to leave the nest, New York is where most people think they have to go, and it's been that way since the first skyscraper.

I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

As long as karma exists, the world changes. There will always be karma to be taken care of.

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite are contrived to be constant companions.

Your personal testimony, however meaningful it is to you, is not the gospel.

Quality and perfection are achieved with time. You do not create a perfect painting or a perfect poem by hurrying. Time is always coming.