If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you moves your hand to give something back.

If I believe that abortion is wrong, and I want to convince you that it's wrong, there's no reason I should recount to you my personal narrative of how I came to believe this.

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

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

Some comedians really are funnier than others. Some people really are more beautiful than others. But these are true only because of the kinds of creatures we happen to be; the perceptual apparatus - apparati - that we happen to have.

Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they're willing to take that risk.

Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it's not clear to most voters what Democrats' core moral values are.