We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, killings, of wars, or of hatred...If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other?
In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.
Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.
Polarization affects families and groups of friends. Its a paralyzing situation. A civil war of opinion.
Loss of empathy might well be the most enduring and deep-cutting scar of all, the silent blade of an unseen emey, tearing at our hearts and stealing more than our strength- Drizzt Do'Urden
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.
Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.
One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.
Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.
That's what's terrible about wars when whole societies adopt an impulse of objectification. Everything becomes black and white.
Cold silence has a tendency to atrophy any sense of compassion between supposed lovers
In a culture of electronic violence, images that once caused us to empathize with the pain and trauma of another human being, excite a momentary adrenaline rush. To be numb to another's pain - to be acculturated to violence - is one of the worst consequences our technological advances. That indifference transfers from the screen, TV, film, Internet, and electronic games to our everyday lives.
You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.
When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.
Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.
If we are forced, at every hour, to watch or listen to horrible events, this constant stream of ghastly impressions will deprive even the most delicate among us of all respect for humanity.
A deadness occurs in relationships when people are no longer willing to tell each other how they really feel.
I'm sorry, those pictures from the Abu Ghraib. At first, they, like infuriated me, I was sad. Then like, a couple days later, after they cut the guy's head off, they didn't seem like much. And now, I like to trade them with my friends.
One applauds the industry of professional philanthropy. But it has its dangers. After a while the private heart begins to harden. We fling letters into the wastebasket, are abrupt to telephoned solicitations. Charity withers in the incessant gale.
