Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort.

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.