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

Fiction is empathy technology.

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.

We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.

Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.