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

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.

If our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team.

Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.

I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology.

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.

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.