"We live in an age of conspicuous compassion. Immodest alms-giving may be as old as humanity — consider the tale of Jesus rebuking the self-exalting Pharisee — but it has flowered spectacularly of recent. We are given to ostentatious displays of empathy to a degree hitherto unknown...

"This book’s thesis is that such displays of empathy do not change the world for the better: they do not help the poor, diseased, dispossessed or bereaved. Our culture of ostentatious caring concerns, rather, projecting one's ego, and informing others what a deeply caring individual you are. It is about feeling good, not doing good, and illustrates not how altruistic we have become, but how selfish."

-- Patrick West, Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes it Really is Cruel to be Kind

"The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

"Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular... Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in — whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no — is what we mean by having a religion."

-- George Santayana, Reason in Religion

"It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world."

-- Brian Greene, "Put a Little Science in Your Life", The New York Times