I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

The costs of an ignorance of science are nor just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures, and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe. the forces that make it tick, the stuff it's made of; the origin of living things, and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of; like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse.

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.

You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.

The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.