Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good [...] rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.

Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.

A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.

The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better.