Bill Bullard

American educator · former Dean of Faculty, San Francisco University High School

Bill Bullard was an educator and former Dean of Faculty at San Francisco University High School. His commencement remarks — contrasting opinion as the “lowest form” of knowledge with empathy as the “highest” — circulated online from 2007 and are the earliest documented source of the saying. Bullard credited the thought to novelist George Eliot, but no such passage has been found in her work, so the phrasing is best traced to Bullard himself.

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“Empathy is the highest form of knowledge”

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