There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.

We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don't have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I'm a little more respectful of ants.

You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.

It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid.