No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science.

Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt.

I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.

I don't think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive.

No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can't decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you've made in your life to date.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.

The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.