People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

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.

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.

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.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.