I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

No I'm not a dream, I'm your worst nightmare

Whether we wound or are wounded, the blood that flows is red.

Renew your mind daily by reading the Holy Scriptures.

...because unlike some, I wasn't in line when they were handling out perfect genes.

Artists are not in delusion, they only recreate the hidden side

When I go on holiday, I wear wedges. They accentuate your leg, honey, and you have to look good on the beach.

My life has been an open book, for better or for worse.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

Patience is the courage of the conqueror, the strength of man against destiny.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.