The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

We know that someone who has channeled his anger into something constructive has not had a cow. How do we know these things?

Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

One of the things cognitive science teaches us is that when people define their very identity by a worldview, or a narrative, or a mode of thought, they are unlikely to change-for the simple reason that it is physically part of their brain, and so many other aspects of their brain structure would also have to change; that change is highly unlikely.