If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.

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.

With a hope and a prayer, you can get there.

The one who walks alone, is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.

The dinner-hour is the summer of the day: full of sunshine, I grant; but not like the mellow autumn of supper.

For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life.

I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels.

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.

You can't accuse me of anything I haven't already confessed to.

Nowadays anyone can show their art to anybody via the Internet.

The greatest flight I've ever flown was coming home.

Only one party sticks out in my mind as a kid. It was the best party ever. I was 5 years old, and my mom dressed me up in a church dress and stockings to go to the party and park.