If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.

I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.