When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy.

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

... people notice differences and expect every difference in form to convey some difference in meaning.

The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.

If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.

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.

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.