I worry that even well-intentioned attempts to "improve nature" (say by reducing suffering) will make things worse even in their own terms.

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.

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.

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.

Loss taught me the priceless value of friends. I would have lost it but for my friends.

By suffering comes wisdom.

But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254

It's true, isn't it, that each of us has two hearts? The secret heart, curled behind like a fist, living gnarled and shrunken beneath the plain, open one we use every day.

Time flies on restless pinions - constant never.

I would have loved to have met Marilyn Monroe and have dinner with her.

One thing I really, truly believe in is having something greater than myself to be grateful to.

To bear and not to own; to act and not lay claim; to do the work and let it go: for just letting it go is what makes it stay.

I've never seen the kind of enthusiasm at the grassroots that I see campaigning with or for Donald Trump.

Penn State has also continued to be a leader in Pennsylvania's largest industry: Agriculture.