Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think empathy is really important for pleasure.
Stories turn anonymous strangers into people who matter.
I love teaching. I wouldn't take a job that didn't include it.
Any simple claim that you need religion to be good is flat wrong.
Humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others.
I think Americans are always going to care more about Americans than about Mexicans.
I think what a lot of fiction is, is the imagining of the worst so as to prepare ourselves.
The fact that something can be used for good isn't necessarily a knockdown argument for it.
What I mean by "empathy" is putting yourself in other people's shoes, feeling what they feel.
If our wondrous kindness is evidence for God, is our capacity for great evil proof of the Devil?
When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy.
I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.
Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats.
The genetic you and the neural you aren't alternatives to the conscious you. They are its foundations.
A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.
We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense.
I think empathy can serve as a moral spark, motivating us to do good things. But anything can be a moral spark.
Empathy zooms you in on an individual and, as a result, it's narrow, it's innumerate, it's racist, it's very biased.
Modern science tells us that the conscious self arises from a purely physical brain. We do not have immaterial souls.
Imagination is Reality Lite - a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.
I am never going to write about dogs again. You can write about Islam, you can write about sexuality, but no, not dogs.
Because of empathy, stories of the suffering of one person could lead us into a war that could kill millions of people.
Periods of cooperation between political parties shouldn't be taken for granted; they are a stunning human achievement.
I have two teenage sons, and they're both surviving, thriving, and having a great time, and they're always on social media.
Too often, our concern for specific individuals today means neglecting crises that will harm countless people in the future.
It's hard to pull apart empathy from compassion. What is really clear is that we innately care for other people at least to some extent.
Families survive the terrible twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons.
Every president, Democratic or Republican, simply works on the supposition that it's better to keep jobs in America than let them go to Mexico.
Because of empathy, we care more for, and devote far more resources to, someone who is familiar, from our country or our group, than a stranger.
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.
And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data.
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.
My younger son told me nobody uses email anymore. I'm this old fogie with my email. I don't know what I'm supposed to communicate with now - SnapChat?
Empathy has some unfortunate features - it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We're often at our best when we're smart enough not to rely on it.
In politics and in society, we can use our reason to rise above our parochial natures. Too bad that our elected officials don't choose to do so more often.
We'd be really screwed if we had to start our life over again as children with our brains right now, because I think we lose the plasticity and flexibility.
Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.
If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be nothing more than a particularly awful psychological disorder.
Even the charities I give to are related to things that touch my life, like the Special Olympics. I'm not fully rational; I'm swayed by my biases and my emotions.
On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution.
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.
The real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; we may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right to us.
Some people think that without that spark of empathy we would do nothing, but that's just flat-out wrong. You could feel compassion for somebody without the spark of empathy.
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.
In my own life, I do not live like an effective altruist. An effective altruist would really disapprove of my life. I don't give enough to charity and I still have both my kidneys.
If Inigo Montoya were around now, he wouldn't need to storm the castle to bring his father's murderer to justice; the police would do it for him, and fewer people would have to die.
By “empathy,” some people mean everything that is good - compassion, kindness, warmth, love, being a mensch, changing the world - and I'm for all of those things. I'm not a monster.
If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.
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.