Imagination tends to be truly useful if accompanied by the power of mental control - if the worlds in one's head can be purposefully manipulated and distinguished from the real one outside it.

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.

Are you going to hand your children over to Big Food, Big Med and Big Pharma? That journey begins with the choice to bottle feed, then it's all down hill from there.

Serve one another with brotherly love.

Maybe we tried to leave as much memories of ourselves with each other because we knew one day we wouldn't be together any more.

Direct experience is the only way.

A historian should not be didactic-that is a word that makes my blood run cold.

Nobody's life is interesting enough to warrant a third memoir.

I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.

Time is all we have. One lifetime under this name to produce a body of work that says, This is how I saw the world. Your work is worthy of whatever time it takes.

When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.

It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval.