Individuals differ in how empathic they are. Some people would really flinch if they watched me hitting my hand with a hammer, and other people would just not care.

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.

Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.

I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.

If people are prepared to eat locally and seasonally, then they probably do pretty well in terms of environmental impact.

Maybe we don't put our young people in situations often enough where they're allowed to fail. When you fail you gain experience, and with enough experience, you don't fail as often.

I just want to keep being creative, and I want to feel inspired by a role, and I want to keep acting.

He slides into second with a stand-up double.

Becoming a politician is the only step down I could take from being a journalist.

You're born in pain and pain is what we're in most of the time. And I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need.

Why do people shush animals? Theyve never spoken

Monster only had the power that you gave them