In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable

Religious reasons, which is no reason. I notice Skeptic had a review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Religious reasons amount to what Dennett terms "skyhooks." Do you believe in skyhooks? I don't.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

In the specific case of abortion, the matter is particularly easy in that no woman wants a late abortion. Once abortion was made legal, the age of the aborted fetus went down. The slope slipped in the other direction. If we legalize RU-486 and other similar new drugs, the age will fall to one week or less and start approaching zero. The slippery slope will slide in the other direction. The only reason we have late abortions is because we make early abortion difficult.

Every measured thing is part of a web of variables more richly interconnected than we know.

The only thing we can really count on in this uncertain world is human unreliability itself.

People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.