When someone brutally kills someone else, we call him "animalistic." But we consider ourselves "human" when we give to the poor.

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.

Personally, I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that.

The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice.

I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.

Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasize the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn't share their beliefs.

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.