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

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.

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.

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.

An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.

You should tell the truth as often as you can, but in such a way as people don't believe you or think that you're being funny.

You have to be able to be a good loser. You have to be okay knowing you're going to fail every day in something without getting mad and upset.

I have a big problem with conductors who gesture a lot.

Always accepting the greatest joy of all is the time that I get to spend with my wife.

I'm a good person but a shitty writer. You're a shitty person but a good writer. We'd make a good team.

When people cease to complain, they cease to think.

…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.

I don't like second place; I'm out there trying to win everything.