I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.

You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

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

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

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.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.