It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

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

I think that we Americans, in particular, tend to think too directly about problems. If there's a problem we want to basically go in with a screwdriver or else drop bombs on it. A better way to solve problems is to think indirectly and try to change the environment. So I think you can gain much better self-control not so much by working on yourself as by looking at the situations you're in and the people you hang around, and changing your environment.

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.