In Shakespeare, unique individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be hanged. Individuals trump the category.
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.
To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are 'production units,' and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests.
It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.
I'm completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world.
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish; Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.
The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
If the breaking news story had to do with hard news, politics specifically, I had a lot to do with it. If it had to do with music, Kurt Loder was more involved.
The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.
Women's roles are diminished for obvious reasons. It's the men whose names are on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and who were generals and soldiers.
The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.
Blushing is thought to be linked to increased levels of norepinephrine in the brain, which may be associated with romantic feelings. It signals that we are interested and excited, which is attractive to men.
There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.
When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy. Sometimes it doesn't stop there.
There is a type of snobbish, pompous journalist who thinks that the only news that has any validity is war, famine, pestilence or politics. I don't come from that school.
I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.
It's just that what's important there is different there than what's important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media.
