Top 70 Paul Bloom Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What I mean by “empathy” is putting yourself in other people’s shoes, feeling what they feel.”

— Paul Bloom

2. “And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data.”

— Paul Bloom

3. “We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good life: a life with sustained relationships, challenging work, and connections to community.”

— Paul Bloom

4. “I think empathy can serve as a moral spark, motivating us to do good things. But anything can be a moral spark.”

— Paul Bloom

5. “We don’t just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they’re made of, what their hidden nature is.”

— Paul Bloom

6. “Because of empathy, we care more for, and devote far more resources to, someone who is familiar, from our country or our group, than a stranger.”

— Paul Bloom

7. “Something as important and central and encompassing as empathy can’t be all bad. I think empathy plays a role in intimate relationships, where you might want your partner not just to care about you or understand you but to feel what you feel.”

— Paul Bloom

8. “By “empathy,” some people mean everything that is good – compassion, kindness, warmth, love, being a mensch, changing the world – and I’m for all of those things. I’m not a monster.”

— Paul Bloom

9. “I draw a lot from Buddhism, which focuses on compassion and kindness, loving kindness, as they call it, but rejects empathy because it’s a poor moral guide. And I think there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that they’re right.”

— Paul Bloom

10. “I’m not a pacifist. I think the suffering of innocent people can be a catalyst for moral action. But empathy puts too much weight on the scale in favor of war. Empathy can really lead to violence.”

— Paul Bloom

11. “Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to and what questions are the right ones to ask.”

— Paul Bloom

12. “Some people think that without that spark of empathy we would do nothing, but that’s just flat-out wrong. You could feel compassion for somebody without the spark of empathy.”

— Paul Bloom

13. “When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they’ll often use empathy.”

— Paul Bloom

14. “I argue that we should be kind, we should be compassionate, and we should definitely be reasonable and rational, but that empathy leads us astray.”

— Paul Bloom

15. “Families survive the terrible twos because toddlers aren’t strong enough to kill with their hands and aren’t capable of using lethal weapons.”

— Paul Bloom

16. “Stories turn anonymous strangers into people who matter.”

— Paul Bloom

17. “Moral deliberation has to be somewhere in the brain, after all. It’s not going to be in the foot or the stomach, and it’s certainly not going to reside in some mysterious immaterial realm. So who cares about precisely where?”

— Paul Bloom

18. “Because of empathy, stories of the suffering of one person could lead us into a war that could kill millions of people.”

— Paul Bloom

19. “It’s hard to pull apart empathy from compassion. What is really clear is that we innately care for other people at least to some extent.”

— Paul Bloom

20. “I’m really interested in the pleasure we get from stories and the pleasure we get from movies, and certainly the pleasure we get from virtual experiences. My complaint is against empathy as a moral guide. But as a source of pleasure, it can’t be beat.”

— Paul Bloom

21. “Nobody uses email anymore. I’m this old fogie with my email. I don’t know what I’m supposed to communicate with now – SnapChat?”

— Paul Bloom

22. “I kind of like social media, and I like hearing from people. I don’t like the ugly stuff, but there are some people – smart people – who have a very different perspective, and I’ll get a backlash from them. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

— Paul Bloom

23. “People differ in where they direct their empathy and their compassion. Many people are intensely concerned about the suffering of non-human animals, and some do not care at all. There are cultural differences.”

— Paul Bloom

24. “You might argue on utilitarian grounds that the best way for the world to work is for everybody to take care of themselves first. And people have made that argument. But I just think we would be so much better off if we could care for distant others even a little bit more.”

— Paul Bloom

25. “Every president, Democratic or Republican, simply works on the supposition that it’s better to keep jobs in America than let them go to Mexico.”

— Paul Bloom

26. “I think if we could turn the dial a bit, and try to take what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called “the point of view of the universe”, and look from above, and realize that we are not special, none of us are, I think it would just cause a transformation.”

— Paul Bloom

27. “When I write I’ll sometimes say things which are somewhat controversial – not because I’m seeking out controversy for its own sake, but if I don’t have anything to say which is different, why am I bothering to write stuff down in the first place?”

— Paul Bloom

28. “A religion such as Judaism or Catholicism might survive even if it comes to reject a literal account of God creating man and animals. But it cannot survive the rejection of an immaterial soul.”

— Paul Bloom

29. “Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats.”

— Paul Bloom

30. “The effects of Twitter and Facebook and all those things on people’s psychologies is a really interesting question to which nobody knows the answer.”

— Paul Bloom

31. “Empathy zooms you in on an individual and, as a result, it’s narrow, it’s innumerate, it’s racist, it’s very biased.”

— Paul Bloom

32. “For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome.”

— Paul Bloom

33. “It has been a period where people have been far nicer to one another in every possible way. I’m not saying it’s because we’re dropping our empathy that we’re nicer to each other, just that the drop doesn’t seem to be causing any harm.”

— Paul Bloom

34. “If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.”

— Paul Bloom

35. “Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one’s appetites.”

— Paul Bloom

36. “Less empathy, more kindness.”

— Paul Bloom

37. “The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.”

— Paul Bloom

38. “I have huge admiration for people who think like the effective altruist, who try to rationally think about how they can change the world for the better, and who try not to be swayed by irrational considerations, such as skin color or whether or not someone lives in the same neighborhood.”

— Paul Bloom

39. “Forgery is just the most dramatic example of the importance of origin. Arthur Koestler described a friend who owned a drawing that she first took to be a reproduction. When she later discovered that it was an original by Picasso, she displayed it more prominently, claimed that she saw it differently, and enjoyed it more. For her, its value went up.”

— Paul Bloom

40. “I think there’s some evidence that we’re empathic by nature. There is some evidence from studies of babies and young children that they resonate with the pain of others, and there’s some work by Frans de Waal that other primates also resonate with the pain of others.”

— Paul Bloom

41. “We have gut feelings, but we also have the capacity to override them, to think through issues, including moral issues, and to come to conclusions that can surprise us. I think this is where the real action is. It’s what makes us distinctively human, and it gives us the potential to be better to one another, to create a world with less suffering and more flourishing and happiness. There.”

— Paul Bloom

42. “I am never going to write about dogs again. You can write about Islam, you can write about sexuality, but no, not dogs.”

— Paul Bloom

43. “I have two teenage sons, and they’re both surviving, thriving, and having a great time, and they’re always on social media.”

— Paul Bloom

44. “Even the charities I give to are related to things that touch my life, like the Special Olympics. I’m not fully rational; I’m swayed by my biases and my emotions.”

— Paul Bloom

45. “Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans – language, rationality, culture, and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”

— Paul Bloom

46. “As you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise,” or Rabbi Hillel’s statement, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary thereof.”

— Paul Bloom

47. “I think we should really discourage this sort of empathic engagement when it comes to making moral decisions. I think we should focus on something like compassion, on getting people to care more for others without putting ourselves in their shoes.”

— Paul Bloom

48. “The idea I’ll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling – whatever one chooses to call this – is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we’re better off without it.”

— Paul Bloom

49. “Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient. If you made a sadist more empathic, it would just lead to a happier sadist, and if I were indifferent to the baby’s suffering, her crying would be nothing more than an annoyance.”

— Paul Bloom

50. “I love teaching. I wouldn’t take a job that didn’t include it.”

— Paul Bloom