I think empathy is really important for pleasure.

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's amazing the clarity that comes with psychotic jealousy.

Disruption never helps your cause. ... It just looks like you're afraid to have rational discussion.

Well even before she was diagnosed with the cancer, I would have said that she was a lot tougher than me and most guys would probably say that about their wives and it's probably true in most cases.

It is not a matter of time so much as a matter of heart; if you have the heart to pray, you will find the time.

For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few.

I don't see why a poem couldn't be spoken out a car window or written on the beach at low tide. In fact, I'm sure people are doing it.

Fasting is like spring cleaning for your body.

What's it like being opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger? For me? Are you kidding? Maybe if I'm lucky, come up to his navel!

Medicine has made all its progress during the past fifty years. ... How many operations that are now in use were known fifty years ago?-they were not operations, they were executions.

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.