I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.

We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?

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

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.