If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide

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

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

When I sell liquor, it's bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lakeshore Drive, it's hospitality.

Your mind is a book

Nothing is too difficult unless you decide to keep shifting it to tomorrow till you can’t do it any longer.

It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.

And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must ..... eventually ..... fall.

A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

Sexual harassment is complex, subtle, and highly subjective.

It is easier to criticize than to correct our past errors.

Kill me, I don't care. I do not want to be on this Earth anymore.

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.