I think the greatest truths, the ones that you find in every culture that has any sort of history of reflection of writing, the greatest truth is that there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. That's the way Shakespeare put it. But you get basically the same idea from Buddha, from the Bhagavad Gita in India, and from the Stoics in ancient Greece and Rome.

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide

I think the greatest work in social psychology from the 1950s and '60s is enormously important. I wish every high school kid could take a course in social psychology. I think we're making enormous strides in understanding the brain. These aren't yet giving us great insights, but I feel like we're on the verge of it. In five or ten years this basically searching the brain is really going to change things.