Orson Scott Card Quotes on Empathy
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Ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.
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I'm very good at that. Understanding what other people think.
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In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist.
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It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like [them], understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he would win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine... But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood [them] well enough.
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His eyes were seductive with understanding
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I speak to everyone in the language they understand. That isn't being slick. It's being clear
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I'm not one to despise other people for their sins. I haven't found one yet, that I didn't say to myself, I've done worse than this
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When you really know somebody you can't hate them Or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them Is that a circular paradox? Dom Cristao says that most truth can only be expressed in circular paradoxes I don't think it has anything to do with truth, it's just cause and effect. We can never sort them out. Science refuses to admit any cause except the first cause - knock down one domino, the one next to it also falls. But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is the final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you know what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.
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He would go to minister the girl ... For in her brilliance, her isolation, her pain, her guilt, he saw his own stolen childhood and the seeds of pain that lived with him still.
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I think you can't possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them.
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She thinks she's the only one in the would to ever suffer. I say that without rancor. I have simply observed that she's so full of pain, she's incapable of taking anyone else's pain seriously.
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You'd think she'd learn something from that. But she still does the same thing. Making decisions that deform other people's lives, without consulting them, without ever conceiving that perhaps they don't want her to save them from whatever supposed misery she's saving them from.
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He saw them with such better understanding that they took on power and meaning beyond anything in his experience before.
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Individual people have always been more important to her than to me. It's my weakness, that I don't have her awareness of other people's feelings
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He isn't insane, he's simply as trapped in his life as I am in mine. That makes us friends
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Humans feel compassion primarily for those they conceive of as being part of themselves
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There are many things that men and women do not say, because to say them would only bring unhappiness
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I know how it feels to have driven all compassion out of my heart and laugh at the pain of someone else
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It was like a bunch of children, doing something they knew they shouldn't ought to, and then their pa comes along and catches them at it. Having been caught in such mischief himself sometimes, he almost felt a little sympathy
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You as stupid as they come. Of course, I say this with your best interests at heart. Most people are stupid. I don't hold it against them
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The good heart, now it can think of things that evil can't imagine, cause it has no heart
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I knew [her] better than any living soul. Better than she knew herself. So I knew right then, long before she understood it herself, that she was in love with [him]
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Ansset did not understand the words, but the tone of voice was clear. He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them
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Each incapable of knowing the others virtue, because like all children they only wanted to be known, and cared little about giving that gift to others
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I'm very happy for you... True love is rare
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He had an overdeveloped sense of empathy. He could imagine other peoples suffering, and felt it himself. His mother had used that against him all his life, torturing him with guilt for all the suffering of her life