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

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.

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.

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

His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, in small things as well as in big things.

Happy [is] the man who knows his duties!

The basic fact is simple: life begins not at birth, but conception.

No man or woman is uniformly successful... we must all expect a rather high percentage of failure in the things we attempt.

Does the terror threat we're facing grow out of a perversion of Islam, or does it represent and extreme, but durable, strain of the religion.

First study the science, and then practice the art which is born of that science.

Fear is a force that sharpens your senses. Being afraid is a state of paralysis in which you can't do anything.

I was once more in a time which the things around me were changing and that is how I wanted it to be for the rest of my days.

Love is the sea where intellect drowns.