Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.

With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.

Doubter wants proof which contributes nothing to her faith.

I cannot be bound to the confines of your rules. I am the exception to them.

My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.

Because the stuff that they feed kids now, they'll have a bunch of idiots in the next millennium as far as art and culture is concerned.

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

The only dream I've ever had is to become a major league baseball player.

I am a mixture of idealist and realist.

The sooner we become a multi-planet species, the safer the species is, and the stronger the guarantee that we're going to continue to evolve.

At a certain point in my personal life, I went through a divorce and lost some people close to me.