Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

While eschewing emotion - and its companion vulnerability - Obama should be careful not to sacrifice empathy the 'I feel your pain' connection that sustained Clinton. This connection is the shorthand people use to measure their leaders' intentions. If people believe you're on their side they will trust your decisions.

I think we are living in selfish times. I'm the first one to say that I'm the most selfish. We live in the so-called 'first world ' and we may be first in a lot of things like technology but we are behind in empathy.

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

Like many people most Libertarians feel empathy and sympathy for less fortunate people. But they know you can't have perfection in a world of limited resources.

I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

Obama often criticizes policies that place the interests of the powerful ahead of the powerless. But through his administration's support of abortion rights Obama shows his lack of empathy for society's most powerless.

We shall listen not lecture learn not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy not on military might.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental mind-shaping driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

When a mother quarrels with a daughter she has a double dose of unhappiness hers from the conflict and empathy with her daughter's from the conflict with her. Throughout her life a mother retains this special need to maintain a good relationship with her daughter.

I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn't care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible horrible horrible creatures. They don't like people. It's not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.

As you get older you have more respect and empathy for your parents. Now I have a great relationship with both of them.

There are many respects in which America if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power can be an intelligent example to the world.

He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.

Good politics starts with empathy proceeds to analysis then sets out values and establishes the vision before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

We need somebody who's got the heart the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges.

The struggle of my life created empathy - I could relate to pain being abandoned having people not love me.

Learning a foreign language and the culture that goes with it is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.

I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination the whole world opens up to you.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

When you sing with a group of people you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy the great social virtue.

Republicans rarely criticize Obama for lack of empathy - in part because liberals have traditionally been seen as standing up for the weak and the vulnerable. Conservatives can be just as empathetic. But they believe that in most cases it's not government's role to be the primary dispenser of empathy.

Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation.