The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.

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

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.

It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. 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.

The consistent finding of psychological research is that we are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It's our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at ourselves in a rose-colored mirror.