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.

By temperament and disposition and emotions, I'm a liberal; but in my beliefs about what's best for the country, I'm a centrist.

Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.

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

Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.