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.

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.