I think the voters who voted for Donald Trump certainly are willing to tolerate a lot of ugliness, but maybe, if you're in desperate circumstances, or you think America is deeply in trouble, you're willing to tolerate that without necessarily liking it.

Bill Clinton pandered by telling you what you wanted to hear. John Kerry panders by never telling you what you don't want to hear. This is negative pandering; he talks a lot without really ruling anything out so you can draw your own conclusions.....Kerry has been talking for years, and yet such is the thicket of his verbiage that he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity.

On the [Betsy] DeVos case, I agree that the gun - her gun position is kind of weird, kind of crazy, but I do think she does know about public schools.

Empathy makes you more aware of other people's suffering, but it's not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.

We don't have the choice to control our emotions, but we do have the power to educate our emotions. And we do that through literature and through art and music to give ourselves a repertoire of emotional experiences.

It's the rising tide of enmity in the country, Donald Trump attacking judges, Donald Trump attacking John McCain, Senator [Richard] Blumenthal, the town halls, the riots in Berkeley. You have got the incivility on the floor of the United States Senate. You have got just a rising tide, every single story.

I don't blame the Democrats for fighting. They have got a very energized base. And there is a lot to complain about a lot of these nominees. But I think, if you are actually going to turn someone down from a president's [Donald Trump] own Cabinet, it better be a lot more egregious than the cases we have seen.