Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations.

The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.

Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.