Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed.

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

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.

Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.

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

Almost everything we do is automatic, yet we're not aware of that. We feel like there's a circle of light. We're like the drunk who lost his keys and is looking under the streetlight, and the cop says, "Where'd you lose your keys?" You say, "Back in the alley, but the light's so much better over here." The divided self refers to the fact that we are basically animals with animal brains. These animal brains run our lives. They're very good at it.