The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious, and it’s really easy to lose.

We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.

Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.

In college, I was dead set on being a philosophy major, because I wanted to figure out the meaning of life. Four years later I realized philosophy had really nothing to say about the meaning of life, and psychology and literature are really where it's at.

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

I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.