Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.

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

In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.

Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.