“Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions.”

“This suggests that our boding mechanisms depend on our own perception of the other and that therefore our ability to bond with them depends much more on emotional settings than on abstract "humanlike" qualities. For the same reason, it is the very emotionality Commmander Data from Star Trek displays every time it complains about having no emotions that endears it; an emotionless machine would not constantly raise the issues of its own worth, value, and personhood.”

“What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedome depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.”

“Since the earliest period of our life was preverbal, everything depended on emotional interaction. Without someone to reflect our emotions, we had no way of knowing who we were.”

“Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.”

“Everyone really is an independent person. When we become a dependent person, we lose our independence. A good part of our work is to reclaim that independent person by letting go of our need for dependence. Dependence enslaves us.”