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.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

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.

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

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

And it’s not just that ‘we all need somebody to lean on’; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help. . . . We need the give and the take, we need to belong. An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.

People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.