The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception

It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.

Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.

The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.

The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.

Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.

Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.

Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.

Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?

When you hand good people possibility, they do great things.

When I look back to where I come from, I realize it's for a good reason that God changed my life.

Each day and the living of it has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.

A good friend will always stab you in the front.

To cultivate an English accent is already a departure away from what you are.

I certainly want a name that I can pronounce!

Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death, it is form, union, plan, it is eternal life, it is happiness.