It would be nice if everybody who had something interesting to say about my work could say it politely and civilly, but it doesn't work that way... Sometimes people are just really nasty.

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.

The bird flying free has no interest in the truth, searching, or looking for a deeper meaning. The bird flying free just "is" and that is why it is free.

At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.

Greater is He that is in you than anything that surrounds you.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

And somewhere from the dim ages of history the truth dawned upon Europe that the morrow would obliterate the plans of today.

Sometimes it's hard for me to tell the difference between independent filmmaking and studio filmmaking because all the studios have these little independent satellites. It's interesting.

You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse.

There was only a handful of guys who were even qualified to work at the WWE.

I identify with the characters very closely. At the same time that I'm outside, writing, I'm also inside, experiencing, and it can be very unsettling.