157 Quotes by Paul Bloom

I draw a lot from Buddhism, which focuses on compassion and kindness, loving kindness, as they call it, but rejects empathy because it’s a poor moral guide. And I think there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that they’re right.

The idea I’ll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling – whatever one chooses to call this – is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we’re better off without it.

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.

Some very common foods and drinks are aversive. Few people enjoy, at first, coffee, beer, tobacco, or chili pepper. Pleasure from pain is uniquely human. No other animal willingly eats such foods when there are alternatives. 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.

While writing this book, I discovered that there is a field of study called “disaster theory.” A lot of the work in this area explores self-interested motivations. In the United States, for instance, presidents are more likely to declare national disasters during election years, and battleground states get more donations than others; money allocated to address disasters is used as an inducement and a reward.

When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they’ll often use empathy.

I’m really interested in the pleasure we get from stories and the pleasure we get from movies, and certainly the pleasure we get from virtual experiences. My complaint is against empathy as a moral guide. But as a source of pleasure, it can’t be beat.

Families survive the terrible twos because toddlers aren’t strong enough to kill with their hands and aren’t capable of using lethal weapons.

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?