Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.

It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.

The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception

Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.

The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.

The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.

Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.

Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.

Faith requires no Tangible Evidenve but remains Optimistic

The more you try to protect yourself from love, the more pain you bring to yourself and those that love you

But at the very moment she was thinking these thoughts, adventure, as she afterwards told my Mother, was stalking her.

Systems programmers are the high priests of a low cult.

There is scarcely any fault in another which offends us more than vanity, though perhaps there is none that really injures us so little.

I still get butterflies. It's because there's a certain level of responsibility you carry when doing a concert. You've got to sound at least as good as the record.

What is marriage now, or what has it ever been? - just a painful suffering, a long suffering, with false smiling faces. It has simply proved to be a misery. At the most it can be just a convenience.

What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.

From breakfast, or noon at the latest, to dinner, I am mostly on horseback, Attending to My Farm or other concerns, which I find healthful to my body, mind, and affairs.

When the world shoves you around, you just gotta stand up and shove back. It's not like somebody's gonna save you if you start babbling excuses.