Quotes

Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish. “We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.” Last year, research at Duke and Harvard universities showed that regardless of political affiliation or income, Americans tended to think wealth distribution ought to be more equal. The problem? Rich people wrongly believed it already was. — Brian Alexander

Open up the gates of the church and let me out of here! Too many people have lied in the name of Christ For anyone to heed the call. So many people have died in the name of Christ That I can't believe it all. — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

If any such lover be in earth which is continually kept from falling, I know it not: for it was not shewed me. But this was shewed: that in falling and in rising we are ever preciously kept in one Love. — Julian of Norwich

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. — Albert Einstein

In his 2 May 2011 televised statement on the killing of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama made a chilling assertion of divine right and national exemption from the rule of law: “Tonight we are once again reminded that Americans can do whatever we set our minds to … we can do these things not because of our wealth and power, but because of who we are, one nation under God indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” — Ken Sehested

''An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community,'' the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, told the Senate Banking Committee yesterday (16 July 2002). The way he sees it, the incentives created by poorly designed stock options ''overcame the good judgment of too many corporate managers." ''It is not,'' he added, ''that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously.'' Stock options meant that executives could get rich if they faked profits, and fake them they did. — Floyd Norris

We don’t come here (to worship) to get stuff done. We come here to get stuff done to us. — Ken Sehested

When heroes die, it is human nature to wrap their lives in metal, marble and granite. We do this that we might remember them, but there is in the remembering also a kind of reduction. The rough and jagged lines of a life lived at the forefront, lived in controversy, conflict and trial, become something smooth and safe enough for children. . . . His life has become a bedtime story. In our day, poor people find themselves denigrated and demeaned in ways that shock conscience. Former South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer once likened them to stray animals one feeds at the back door. Fox News pundit John Stossel sees them as the enemy in a battle between “the makers and the takers.” Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning compares them to scavenging "raccoons." Ann Coulter says welfare creates ‘irresponsible animals." — Leonard Pitts

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. "He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them. 'Bleeding the U.S.,' in his words." — Eric Margolis

To the chagrin of many friends, Will [Campbell] insisted that since “we’re all bastards but God loves us anyway,” there was grace even for racists. It is grace found, not in “acquittal by law” but “acquittal by resurrection,” that “takes us into a freedom where it would never occur to us to kill somebody.” — Bill Leonard