Empathy Gap Quotes

If a boy, if a man, asks you if you're all right and you say yes, he'll always believe you and get on with what he wants to do. It's just the way they're made.

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

That's a very complicated issue [with Donal Trump supporters]. There's things going on with people that we're not privy to, we don't understand. These aren't just a bunch of bad people. That isn't how it works.

I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.

What is the empathy deficit? The inability of people to stand in other folks shoes. It's hard to empathize with people who have different values than you

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.

The unfortunate do not pity the unfortunate.

That's the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don't care, individuals do.

It is very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human.

It's an honest place to be if you don't understand someone else's experience, but there's no way for the other to understand if a conversation or an explanation isn't made.

Most often it happens that one attributes to others only the feelings of which one is capable oneself.

It was like I was inside a fishbowl in the middle of a typhoon, and everyone else was on the outside cluelessly enjoying lovely weather.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

It's important to allow people to affect you. If we kept that at the forefront of our minds, maybe we wouldn't be as divided as we are.

A man used to riding in a car cannot understand a pedestrian.

Don't keep telling your parents they don't understand you. Believe me it's much worse when they do. There's just a chance, you know - they really might.

We feel and weigh soon enough what we suffer from others: but how much others suffer from us, of this we take no heed.

I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.

Man treats woman as his own property and not as being capable of feelings, like himself. The way man treats women is much worse than the way landlords treat servants and the high-caste treat the low-caste. These treat them so demeaningly only in situations mutually affecting them; but men treat cruelly and as slaves, from their birth till death.

The United States has the near inability to see its power from the perspective of the powerless.

All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed.

There is in us all that line that prevents us from fully understanding those who are different.

Long ago it was said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.' That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate, of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.

Soldiers fighting a daily battle under frightening conditions can feel their leaders are far removed from their reality. There's no magic cure for this challenge, and soothing words that aren't backed up by action encourage cynicism.