I think Americans are always going to care more about Americans than about Mexicans.

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.

Wherever I go, whomever I meet, I see myself in their eyes, because I am a part of everything, because I love.

When you grow up close to poultry and fields and gardens and open-air markets, you can't help but develop an instinct for quality food.

To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.

In a marriage, you struggle and struggle and struggle, and then you realize that you have to ride the horse in the direction it's going. You stop trying to pull the reins in another direction.

I'm really no different than anybody else; except that sometimes I get my name in the paper.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

I get fit taking my bike out in the woods.

It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first.

It's all very hazy to me now. I'm glad I made it through that stage. It got a little dicey. There were some drugs going on. I remember singing one song for about a day and a half.

The Muse is mute when public men Applaud a modern throne.