The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.

I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.

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.

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

The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.