People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.

Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.

High status males had multiple wives or additional mating opportunities in the ancestral environment.

As for leadership, I am the kind who leads reluctantly and more by example than anything else. Someone had to be on the incorporation papers as president.

Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors.

If anyone wonders why the airlines are not doing well it is because flying has been made such an unpleasant and degrading experience.

Primates will continue to play social games without the least insight into what is killing them.

Cult recruiting methods based on dosing victims with the brain chemicals released during capture bonding would make cults even more of a problem than they are now.

Could people be trained to be less gullible? Or are you as stuck with gullibility as you are with skin colour?

Anyone who has ever had the feeling of being higher than a kite after giving a public speech is well aware of the effects of attention.

Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.

For the first 30years of life, you keep learning. The rest of your life you keep unlearning what you had learnt

I am familiar with the phrase, ‘needle in a haystack’ and I think I understand its meaning more than I wish to.

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

I like to dress up but I'm not so concerned with looking very sexy, it's really more the art of dressing.

All right, then, I'd die for you. How about that? Don't you think somebody could die for love?

A kiss isn't terminal." "It is the way you do it.

I'm neutral on lying, seeing as how there's times when the truth just hurts people.

They said do what you want, because if we don't like it no one will hear it.

It is preferable to incur a mild punishment than to perform an onerous task.