Line of the Week 6

This passage comes to you from Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

"And yet I find myself returning again and again to my mother's simple principle—'How would that make you feel?'—as a guidepost for my politics.
"It's not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the children in them were like our children. It's hard to imagine the CEO of a company giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care for his workers if he thought they were in some way equals. And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way
"I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current policies in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves."