Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.

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.

But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom...

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

No ideology or psychological theory can possibly do justice to the full range of human experience.

When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence.

How has retirement affected my golf game? A lot more people beat me now.

I can only write about personal stuff, about my point of view.

Critic's delight: scolding the Mighty Dead.

But our wounds are part of who we are...and there is nothing left to chance....And pain's the pen that writes the songs....That call us forth to dance

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.