A person in torment is not going to give you anything.

Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.

Business leaders love the humanities because they know that to innovate you need more than rote knowledge. You need a trained imagination.

People don't just want to feel satisfied. They actually want to act.

Economists get impatient with philosophy. They are often trained as skilled mathematicians. They don't like going back to ordinary language and first principles.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.

I think the imagination helps us move out of the purely oppositional mentality and see the world in a richer and more variegated way.