I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.

In this era of globalization we are witnessing struggles within individual states about what their identity and interests consist in.

We live on a restless planet in a violent universe.

Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.

Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.

One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history.

Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.

I'm a subjectivist about morality.

Ethics is prescriptive and can change behavior, but usually only at the margins.

I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on.

Sometimes, all you need is someone who will listen. It is fortune enough to have people around who hear you & not judge you.

I have no money, but my wallet is overflowing with love.

I give no sources, because it is indifferent to mewhether what I have thought has already beenthought before me by another.

My message is believe in yourself. Have courage in your capacity. Listen to your inner voice. And then the critical component of all this is, do the work.

When you're a little kid, you want the ball. You don't want to play defense. When you get the ball, basically you can do whatever you want.

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

Death carries off a man busy picking flowers with an besotted mind, like a great flood does a sleeping village.

Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity.

That's what interests me in poetry. That withholding, that white space, the pressure, and my long-term faith in violent concision, is still with me.

It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.