The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.

the mind is a neural computer

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.

A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.

We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.

A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.

The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt..., " but "If ... then ... else.

I was all the time tugging and carrying water. But now I have a river that carries me.

What do the Republicans say? Donald Trump? They say they're just going to roll back the Dodd-Frank regulations. They want to undermine the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

One of the things that fascinates me is the music of speech.

Your past doesn't define you. Only your present and your future. If your life is screwed up, stop making excuses. What are you going to do about it today?

New York is where you go to catch a big fish.

Failure can get to be a rather comfortable old friend.

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose

Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?