Human beings need pleasure the way they need vitamins.

Cathedrals are an unassailable witness to human passion. Using what demented calculation could an animal build such places? I think we know. An animal with a gorgeous genius for hope.

[Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes . . . deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond.

Our ancestors were eating meat over 2.5 million years ago. We mainly ate meat, fish, fruits, vegetables and nuts. We have to assume our physiology evolved in association with this diet. The balanced diet for our species was what we could acquire then, not what the government and doctors tell us to eat now.

Eternal vigilance is the price of sexual confidence.

There is a tendency for humans to consciously see what they wish to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. For example, words that evoke anxiety, either because of an individuals personal history or because of experimental manipulation, require greater illumination before first being perceived.

No one attached to the traditional image of authoritarian patriarchy could imagine the consternation men endure. They have suffered an unexpected blow to the emotional quality of their lives. Its gravity has not been calculated. They have far fewer reliable links than women to the classic currents of family life. They are alienated not only, as Marx said, from the means of production but also from the means of reproduction.